Research Priorities

Questions that demand more than one discipline

The Academy’s priorities create common ground for collaboration while leaving room for investigator-led inquiry and emerging questions.

LAANSSSScroll to explore

A USDA agricultural commodity grader conducts a raisin inspection at the Specialty Crops Inspection laboratory in Commerce, California, on 19 October 2023.

Priority Areas

A living agenda across science society and culture

These areas are not departments and do not limit eligible research. They identify challenges where the Academy’s breadth can create distinctive value.

Shared research theme

Climate, Biodiversity & Resilient Ecosystems

Connecting environmental observation, life sciences, Indigenous and local knowledge, public institutions, and just transitions.

This priority examines ecological change as a connected problem of climate, land, oceans, species, institutions, livelihoods, and justice. Work may combine long-term observation, modelling, field ecology, conservation science, law, economics, community knowledge, and the study of how decisions are implemented. Particular attention belongs to tropical forests, mountains, coasts, drylands, freshwater systems, and cities where environmental pressure and social vulnerability interact.

Questions for the agenda

How can observation and local knowledge identify ecological thresholds earlier? Which forms of restoration remain credible under a changing climate, and how should benefits, costs, uncertainty, and stewardship be shared?

Shared research theme

Health Equity & Sustainable Health Systems

Strengthening prevention, evidence, access, health innovation, and preparedness across diverse communities.

Health equity requires more than the availability of medical interventions. It involves prevention, primary care, public-health capacity, trustworthy evidence, workforce conditions, access to medicines and diagnostics, resilient supply chains, and the social conditions that shape exposure and recovery. Comparative work should respect differences between rural, urban, Indigenous, migrant, aging, and geographically isolated populations rather than treating regional averages as adequate descriptions.

Questions for the agenda

Which preventable burdens are hidden by national averages? How can health systems learn from local practice while preserving safety, evaluation, and equitable access?

Shared research theme

Equitable Digital Transformation, AI & Responsible Innovation

Advancing trustworthy technologies while examining rights, access, work, education, creativity, and public value.

Digital transformation is studied as an institutional and human change, not only a technical one. The priority connects computer science, engineering, law, economics, education, linguistics, philosophy, the arts, and public administration. Research should examine performance and failure, the provenance of data, unequal access, labor effects, environmental cost, cultural and linguistic representation, accountability for automated decisions, and the conditions under which innovation creates durable public value.

Questions for the agenda

Where can artificial intelligence improve scientific and public capability without weakening rights or professional judgment? What evidence is needed before a digital system is trusted at scale?

Shared research theme

Inclusive Development, Productivity & Inequality

Studying pathways to prosperity that are institutionally credible, socially inclusive, and environmentally durable.

Inclusive development concerns the institutions and capabilities through which productivity becomes shared and durable wellbeing. Relevant work may study firms, labor, informality, finance, infrastructure, education, taxation, regional inequality, gender, care, innovation, natural resources, and the quality of public administration. The Academy encourages comparisons that explain mechanisms and trade-offs rather than importing policy models without attention to history, capacity, or distributional consequences.

Questions for the agenda

Which combinations of institutions, skills and infrastructure allow productivity gains to broaden opportunity? How should progress be measured when income, security, time, health, territory, and environmental durability move differently?

Shared research theme

Democracy, Governance & Human Rights

Supporting evidence-informed institutions, civic trust, justice, accountability, and peaceful pluralism.

This priority brings evidence to the study of democratic institutions, constitutional practice, public administration, justice, civic participation, political communication, security, and human rights. It values legal and historical analysis alongside quantitative, qualitative, comparative, and community-based research. The objective is not institutional advocacy for a party or ideology, but a clearer understanding of how plural societies build legitimate rules, constrain power, resolve disagreement, and repair failures of trust.

Questions for the agenda

What makes public institutions trustworthy across unequal territories? Which safeguards improve accountability while protecting due process, free inquiry, pluralism, and the rights of minorities?

Shared research theme

Food, Water & Energy Security

Bringing science, engineering, economics, and community knowledge together around essential systems.

Food, water, and energy are interdependent systems shaped by ecology, infrastructure, technology, markets, law, culture, and household practice. Research may address watersheds, soils, crops, fisheries, nutrition, storage, grids, extraction, renewable energy, urban demand, rural livelihoods, and risk. The priority favors work that makes system boundaries explicit and tests whether proposed solutions transfer burdens across places, sectors, generations, or vulnerable populations.

Questions for the agenda

How can essential systems remain reliable under climate variability and rapid urban change? Which technical and institutional combinations reduce scarcity without creating new ecological or social harm?

Shared research theme

Cultural Heritage, Languages & Plural Identities

Preserving memory and living traditions while supporting interpretation, creativity, and intercultural dialogue.

Cultural heritage includes monuments and archives, but also languages, oral traditions, performance, craft, ritual, memory, digital culture, and the living practices through which communities interpret the past. Research should address preservation and access together, recognizing provenance, community authority, contested histories, restitution, documentation standards, and the risks of removing knowledge from context. Creativity and change are treated as part of cultural continuity rather than its opposite.

Questions for the agenda

How can fragile records and languages be sustained without freezing living culture? What forms of access, attribution, consent, and interpretation respect communities while supporting scholarship and public learning?

Shared research theme

Science, Education & Systems of Knowledge

Improving research capacity, education, open knowledge, scientific integrity, and public understanding.

Strong knowledge systems depend on research institutions, education, libraries, data infrastructures, peer review, ethical practice, publication, multilingual communication, and public confidence. This priority studies how those systems include or exclude people, how evidence moves between experts and institutions, and how incentives affect quality. It also considers research careers, open knowledge, scientific literacy, teacher preparation, and the conditions that allow critical inquiry to endure.

Questions for the agenda

Which reforms improve research quality as well as quantity? How can education and communication strengthen public reasoning without oversimplifying uncertainty or turning scholarship into institutional promotion?

Research Across Settings

Strong questions connect laboratories landscapes institutions and communities

The Academy’s research agenda is deliberately plural. It can bring controlled experiments into conversation with field observation, engineering validation, archival interpretation, population evidence, and institutional analysis. The method changes with the question, but transparency and proportional claims remain constant.

Observation at the right scale

Laboratory evidence is strongest when protocols, controls, measurement limits, and routes to verification are explicit.

Context is part of the evidence

Environmental and agricultural questions require attention to place, season, communities, infrastructure, and long-term change.

Validation before deployment

Engineering claims should be tested for reliability, safety, maintainability, social consequence, and conditions of use.

A framework not a fixed programme

Priorities provide direction while scholarly judgment determines the work

Research priorities identify areas in which the Academy’s disciplinary breadth can produce distinctive intellectual value. They do not function as funding calls, institutional claims of current projects, or limits on the independent work of Fellows. A priority becomes active work only when a defined question, appropriate expertise, responsible leadership, a review route, and a feasible form of output are in place.

The agenda is expected to evolve. Periodic review should consider scientific developments, regional and global relevance, the availability of genuine expertise, opportunities for cross-divisional contribution, and whether the Academy can add something more rigorous than commentary already available elsewhere.

USGS scientists collect surface-water samples for antimicrobial-resistance research at Exit Creek in Kenai Fjords National Park, Alaska, on 18 July 2023.

How Priorities Become Work

Focused questions Relevant disciplines Transparent outputs

Focused questions

Work begins with a question precise enough to determine what evidence could answer it and important enough to justify convening the Academy’s breadth. The proposal should distinguish a researchable question from a broad topic, identify what is already known, explain whose decisions or understanding may benefit, and state the geographic, temporal, and conceptual boundaries of the inquiry. Uncertainty is part of the design and should not be hidden behind a general statement of ambition.

Relevant disciplines

Participation follows the needs of the question. Each contributing field should have a defined intellectual role, appropriate expertise, and a clear account of the methods or interpretation it brings. Interdisciplinarity is not created by assembling many titles; it is created when disciplines change the framing, evidence, analysis, or consequences of the work. Local and community knowledge may be essential, and when it is included the terms of consent, attribution, authority, and benefit should be agreed rather than assumed.

Transparent outputs

The output format follows the maturity of the evidence and the purpose of the work. A working paper, methods note, evidence review, dialogue, dataset, or research framework may be more honest than a consensus statement. Every output should identify its contributors and reviewers, disclose relevant interests, describe methods and source limits, distinguish institutional approval from authorship, preserve documented disagreement where it matters, and provide a route for correction or revision.

Possible scholarly outputs

The format follows the question and the standard follows the claim

Evidence reviews and state-of-knowledge synthesesInterdisciplinary working papers and research frameworksScholarly dialogues and comparative perspectivesMethods notes data standards and terminology guidanceConsensus statements only where process and evidence justify themPublic-facing explanations that preserve uncertainty and attribution

In depth

From a worthwhile question to usable knowledge

A research priority becomes workable when a broad concern is translated into a question with a clear purpose and an appropriate scale. Food security, for example, can generate questions about ecological conditions, household decisions, infrastructure or public institutions. Choosing among them requires an account of what is already known, what remains uncertain and who could use a better answer. The research question should identify the phenomenon being examined and the kind of claim the study could reasonably support. This early discipline helps prevent an ambitious topic from becoming an unfocused collection of activities.

Design also involves deciding what would count as a useful answer. Some projects seek explanation; others develop a method, interpret a body of material or describe a poorly documented situation. The intended contribution determines which expertise, sources and comparisons are needed. Consultation with potential users can reveal overlooked assumptions, but it should not predetermine findings. A concise concept note can connect the question, rationale, proposed approach and practical limits. Before a programme is announced, its organizers should be able to explain why the planned work is both intellectually worthwhile and feasible with the resources available.

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