Interdisciplinary research team wins NNF award for their teaching

Things have moved quickly since Nathalia Brichet and Liza Rosenbaum Nielsen first met in 2019. Together with Frida Hastrup from the Saxo Institute, they received funding from the Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF) for the project Cattle Crossroads. Researching Danish livestock production for the future, which explores opportunities for green transition of Danish livestock production. Since then, the conversations and activities within this collaboration have been a rich source of new and unconventional ideas.

Within teaching alone, the group has launched an interdisciplinary PhD course that contextualizes disciplinary approaches to the green transition within broader social, political, and scientific debates and agendas. They have also redesigned an entire master’s level course in the veterinary program, taking sustainability and the green transition as a starting point and drawing on inspiration from the planetary boundaries framework. Additionally, they have opened an exhibition at Frederiksberg Campus, creating a space for dialogue about intensive livestock production and the dilemmas it raises. All three initiatives have been well received and have garnered positive feedback.

Now, their efforts and collaboration are receiving further recognition, as the Novo Nordisk Foundation has awarded its 2025 Prize for Excellence in Interdisciplinary Teaching at Universities to Liza and Nathalia. The prize amounts to DKK 1,500,000, of which each of them receives DKK 25,000 as a personal honorary award, while the remainder is allocated to the university as an educational grant.

“We are both absolutely thrilled and humbled by this. It’s truly not something we ever expected,” says Liza about receiving the award. Nathalia agrees:

“We’ve taken a rather idealistic approach to our work, focusing on the difficult questions surrounding sustainability - questions that do not have clear-cut answers, but that we nonetheless believe are important to ask. So, it’s really great to receive recognition for questions rather than answers with this award,” says Nathalia.

Mutual curiosity

As Liza is a veterinarian and Nathalia is an anthropologist, their collaboration has been shaped by approaches that sometimes point in opposite directions. While Liza is used to working towards definitive answers, such as diagnosing or providing specific answers to research questions, Nathalia works to open up subjects, such as understanding why diagnostic practices or research questions are framed the way they are.

Using these different approaches, they have, together with their team of colleagues, developed  shared analytical perspectives that form the foundation of their teaching activities. Both Liza and Nathalia emphasize a genuine and deeply integrated curiosity about each other’s fields as the core of their collaboration, along with mutual patience in understanding each other’s academic viewpoints.

“We don’t just come in, deliver our knowledge, and leave again. We keep asking, ‘Why does your knowledge look the way it does?’ That has been a major driving force in our interdisciplinary collaboration: curiosity and a shared exploration of what our fields can do. It means that we can really frustrate each other at times, but at other times, we also reach new heights together,” says Nathalia.

A desire to make a difference

The overarching theme of the work that Liza and Nathalia are receiving the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s teaching award for is sustainability and the green transition. And the fact that their collaboration has been so successful is not just that they click personally and academically, but also that they are both committed to investigating and finding solutions to the unsustainable relationship between our livestock production and the planetary boundaries.

“Our motivation has also come from concerns about the state of planetary health. So, we have worked with sustainability and the green transition out of a personal need to take action. That’s also at the heart of the redesigned master’s course. Now, our students learn about sustainability in livestock production with input from many different disciplines, which we haven’t really done before. Previously, the focus was primarily on diagnosing and treating animals. But we’re seeing that many of the students are really enthusiastic about it,” says Liza.

The same eagerness to promote discussions about sustainability and the green transition also underpins the exhibition on livestock production that Nathalia has curated at Frederiksberg Campus. The exhibition is used in university teaching and is also open to the public, attracting visitors from industry, the farming sector, high schools, and elementary schools. And the team is even making plans to expand the exhibition.

With the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s prize and educational grant, Liza and Nathalia are now considering the next steps for developing interdisciplinary work on sustainability and the green transition in livestock production.