Multi-disciplinary in the context of "Outline of academic disciplines"

Environmental science is an academic field that integrates the physical, biological, and mathematical sciences to study the environment and solve environmental problems. It uses an integrated, quantitative, and interdisciplinary approach to analyze environmental systems and emerged from the fields of natural history and medicine during the Enlightenment. It is considered interdisciplinary because it is an integration of various fields such as: biology, chemistry, physics, geology, engineering, sociology, and ecology.

Environmental science came alive as a substantive, active field of scientific investigation in the 1960s and 1970s driven by, the need for a multi-disciplinary approach to analyze complex environmental problems, the arrival of substantive environmental laws requiring specific environmental protocols of investigation, and the growing public awareness of a need for action in addressing environmental problems. Events that spurred this development included the publication of Rachel Carson's landmark environmental book Silent Spring along with major environmental issues becoming public, such as the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, and the Cuyahoga River of Cleveland, Ohio "catching fire", also in 1969.

Control engineering, also known as control systems engineering and, in some European countries, automation engineering, is an engineering discipline that deals with control systems, applying control theory to design equipment and systems with desired behaviors in control environments. The discipline of controls overlaps and is usually taught along with electrical engineering, chemical engineering and mechanical engineering at many institutions around the world.

The practice uses sensors and detectors to measure the output performance of the process being controlled; these measurements are used to provide corrective feedback helping to achieve the desired performance. Systems designed to perform without requiring human input are called automatic control systems (such as cruise control for regulating the speed of a car). Multi-disciplinary in nature, control systems engineering activities focus on implementation of control systems mainly derived by mathematical modeling of a diverse range of systems.

Molecular biology /məˈlɛkjʊlər/ is a branch of biology that seeks to understand the molecular structures and chemical processes that are the basis of biological activity within and between cells. It is centered largely on the study of nucleic acids (such as DNA and RNA) and proteins. It examines the structure, function, and interactions of these macromolecules as they orchestrate processes such as replication, transcription, translation, protein synthesis, and complex biomolecular interactions. The field of molecular biology is multi-disciplinary, relying on principles from genetics, biochemistry, physics, mathematics, and more recently computer science (bioinformatics).

Though cells and other microscopic structures had been observed in organisms as early as the 18th century, a detailed understanding of the mechanisms and interactions governing their behavior did not emerge until the 20th century, when technologies used in physics and chemistry had advanced sufficiently to permit their application in the biological sciences. The term 'molecular biology' was first used in 1945 by the English physicist William Astbury, who described it as an approach focused on discerning the underpinnings of biological phenomena—i.e. uncovering the physical and chemical structures and properties of biological molecules, as well as their interactions with other molecules and how these interactions explain observations of so-called classical biology, which instead studies biological processes at larger scales and higher levels of organization. In 1953, Francis Crick, James Watson, Rosalind Franklin, and their colleagues at the Medical Research Council Unit, Cavendish Laboratory, were the first to describe the double helix model for the chemical structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), which is often considered a landmark event for the nascent field because it provided a physico-chemical basis by which to understand the previously nebulous idea of nucleic acids as the primary substance of biological inheritance. They proposed this structure based on previous research done by Franklin, which was conveyed to them by Maurice Wilkins and Max Perutz. Their work led to the discovery of DNA in other microorganisms, plants, and animals.