Founded by GEC Academy and Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2021, SJTU – GEC Center of Innovative Design for Interdisciplinary Studies is a university-level and non-profit joint research center specializing in interdisciplinary research of the highest quality. The Center is committed to building a decentralized and borderless academic platform to foster innovative, interdisciplinary endeavors and boost cross-disciplinary collaboration among young researchers, with a major advantage of this approach being the opportunity for open science.​​​

With the ever-quickening changes in the fields of science and technology, research is moving towards more interdisciplinary endeavors. New academic disciplines are increasingly emerging, and they are then being combined to form new fields to provide better answers to emerging questions, indicating the great significance and necessity of in-depth interdisciplinarity for future research activity. And there’s a greater need for innovative, interdisciplinary, and practical skills. Despite the central role of interdisciplinarity in the current world, inadequate attention has been given to the specific challenge of doing interdisciplinary research in practice. Therefore, this Joint Research Center was established for increasing access to scientific outputs to promote long-term research as well as innovation in emerging frontier and interdisciplinary areas for common good, and very importantly, creating a favorable and cooperative education environment for the scientific community and society.

The Center strives to explore continuous innovative designs for interdisciplinary studies and to jointly build a decentralized and cooperative platform for emerging technology, in supporting the development of future interdisciplinary researchers.

With a mission to become a contributing role in building interdisciplinary capacity, the Center will endeavor to maximize the competitive advantages of universities and enterprises and work together with different stakeholders to promote interdisciplinary research and prepare researchers for an interdisciplinary future.