English professor Lorenzo Servitje has been awarded a $149,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to establish the Integrational Health Humanities and Allied Sciences Lab (IH²AS), a revolutionary initiative that brings together the humanities and health sciences as equal partners in addressing complex health challenges.

Led by Servitje, the three-year grant will support the development of innovative interdisciplinary research and graduate education programs that incorporate history, ethics, literature, and philosophy into health sciences training.

“In calculus, an integral defines the area under the curve between two points,” said Servitje, associate professor of English and Health, Medicine & Society. “In linguistics and cognitive psychology, integration is the process of mapping information across domains. Our integrals aim to do just that: map knowledge between 1) disciplines and 2) teaching and research.” 

The IH²AS Lab will establish a new graduate certificate in population health and humanities and support interdisciplinary research units called "integrals" that center on humanistic questions related to health. Each integral includes collaboration between humanities scholars and faculty or graduate students in the health and allied sciences, developing both research and curricular components.

Gabrielle String, assistant professor of environmental engineering in Lehigh's P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science, serves as co-director of the project. String holds a joint appointment in the Department of Population Health within Lehigh's College of Health. Together with Servitje, she co-leads the Lab's inaugural integral, "Microbes Among Us," which explores antimicrobial resistance through an interdisciplinary lens combining laboratory science with historical and cultural analysis.

The Lab will also develop a disability studies integral and support a third collaborative unit selected through a competitive, university-wide proposal process. Through these integrals, graduate students will engage in active research while earning credentials that prepare them for evolving academic and professional pathways.

"The IH²AS Lab creates an infrastructure that generates novel, timely interdisciplinary research in health and the allied sciences," said Servitje. "It's designed not only to serve our institution but also to generate a replicable model for interdisciplinary curriculum development at institutions across the country."

The project addresses a critical gap in higher education by moving beyond consultative collaborations to true integration of humanities and health sciences. Graduate students will gain methodological range, ethical literacy, and translational research skills —competencies increasingly valued as academic and workforce needs evolve.

Over the three-year grant period, the lab will credential 10 or more graduate students, engage 20 or more faculty and students in cross-disciplinary teaching and research, and disseminate findings through conferences, publications, and an open-access repository of curricular materials. A public symposium in the final year will showcase student research and share best practices with peer institutions.

The project has already secured institutional support, including an internal Graduate Program Ideation Grant to fund early development of the Graduate Certificate. Lehigh's Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Programs, and Vice Provost of Graduate Studies have committed resources to ensure the Lab's long-term sustainability.

The National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation.