Multidisciplinary Engineering Overview

Principles

Definition

Multidisciplinary engineering is an academic field and methodological approach that integrates principles, methods, and knowledge from multiple engineering disciplines and/or other academic domains. This interdisciplinary framework is employed to investigate and address complex technical and societal challenges that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries, fostering innovative solutions and enabling practitioners to navigate diverse problem spaces.

Ontological type

Core Methods

Application Domains

Competencies and Skills

Key developments

Key Figures

Integrated Curricula Emergence era

During the Integrated Curricula Emergence, leading engineering education scholars emphasized tying design, manufacturing, and management together through project-based capstones, hands-on labs, and industry partnerships. James M. Wankat, a central figure in this era, championed capstone-driven, project-based design and ABET-aligned outcomes, helping institutionalize integrated design sequences in curricula. Richard Felder and Rebecca Brent promoted active, collaborative, problem-based learning and student-centered pedagogy across engineering programs, advancing methods that support multidisciplinary integration and professional skills. Daniel Atman and collaborators used verbal protocol analysis and case-based studies to uncover cognitive patterns in engineering design teams, providing evidence that shaped design pedagogy and team-based curriculum design.

Distributed Learning Synthesis era

Chris Rogers [1] is a scholar whose work in the Distributed Learning Synthesis era (2007–2013) drew on affiliations with Tufts University [2] and the University of Bristol [3]. One of his key contributions is reflected in Advancing Engineering Education in P-12 Classrooms [4], a landmark 2008 paper that highlighted integrating engineering design with learning sciences and articulated cross-domain competencies as essential for distributed learning. These efforts helped to frame distributed learning as the integration of people, tools, and contexts, providing a theoretical and empirical basis for linking K–12, higher education, and practice environments. By foregrounding situated cognition and collaboration across domains, Rogers's work laid groundwork for early multidisciplinary design thinking and sustained pipelines within the era's aims.

Practice-Based Co-Design era

Maura Borrego [1] is an influential scholar in this Practice-Based Co-Design era, affiliated with Stanford University [3] and Boston University [4]. Her key contribution is summarized by the 2014 paper Systematic Literature Reviews in Engineering Education and Other Developing Interdisciplinary Fields [7], which helped standardize evidence synthesis across engineering education and interdisciplinary fields, a foundational capability for guiding practice-based curricular design and assessment in this era. Jeffrey E. Froyd [2] is associated with Park University [5] and the University of California, Berkeley [6] during this period. Through the same Systematic Literature Reviews paper [7], his work contributed to building a rigorous evidence base for engineering education and interdisciplinary co-design, enabling informed decisions about CDIO-inspired curricula, modeling practices, and cross-disciplinary collaboration in this era.