multidisciplinary

adjective

mul·​ti·​dis·​ci·​plin·​ary ˌməl-tē-ˈdi-sə-plə-ˌner-ē 

-ˌtī-,

 especially British  -ˌdi-sə-ˈpli-nə-rē

: combining or involving more than one discipline or field of study : interdisciplinary

Treatment requires a multidisciplinary approach involving physicians, nutritionists, psychologists, trainers, and gynecologists …

—Michelle L. Cameron Donaldson

However, the task of interpreting such spectra … will take a multidisciplinary team of astrophysicists, Earth scientists, climate scientists, and biologists.

—Sarah Scoles

Indeed, nanotechnology may change the way we think about mechanical engineering altogether, making it a more multidisciplinary field, one as concerned with atomic-level effects as electrical engineering or chemistry is.

—Stephen L. Girshick and Arun Majumdar

Did you know?

A discipline is a field of study. So a multidisciplinary (or interdisciplinary) course is a team-taught course in which students are asked to understand a single subject as it's seen by two or more traditional disciplines. Multidisciplinary teaching can open students' eyes to different views of a subject that they had never considered before. A multidisciplinary panel discussion, on the other hand, presents views from scholars in different fields but may leave any merging of the information to the audience.

Examples of multidisciplinary in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

With a multidisciplinary practice that spans installation, sculpture, performance and video, Akhavan creates work that looks at the histories of specific spaces and the differences between the architecture of public and private spaces. —Maximilíano Durón, ARTnews.com, 24 Oct. 2024

Bowen’s gyrating grass linking Earthlings to Mars will appear in Blended Worlds: Experiments in Interplanetary Imagination, a new exhibit featuring 10 multidisciplinary artists who collaborated with scientists and engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. —Leslie Katz, Forbes, 13 Sep. 2024

Progressive firms would be wise to explore strategic partnerships with elite multidisciplinary business consultancies and/or large tech companies. —Mark A. Cohen, Forbes, 1 Nov. 2024

Beyond being inspired by the follies of youth, the multidisciplinary artist’s latest body of work came as he was confronted by death. —Violet Goldstone, WWD, 21 Oct. 2024

Word History

First Known Use

1944, in the meaning defined above