Douglas G. Stuart has promulgated interdisciplinary biomedical teaching and research since joining the faculty in 1967. First, with colleagues in anatomy and neurology he pioneered an interdisciplinary neuroscience course for first-year medical students when few such approaches were evident in medical education. Next he played a leading role in 1970s' attempts to advance interdisciplinary biomedical engineering at the university. Shortly thereafter, he lead the charge for a university-wide neuroscience group, which effort was followed by recommending that his own department of physiology convert its PhD program into a university-wide physiological sciences program, the first such conversion in the USA. .He was a co-founder, former director (1986-2002), and now the archivist (2002-present) of an informal, NIH-funded statewide predoctoral and postdoctoral interdisciplinary program in movement neuroscience. This program continues to strengthen ties between the physical- and life sciences, and between the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona State University, Northern Arizona, and the University of Arizona.

Dr. Stuart's own research program brought together physicians, mathematicians, and biologists, with several of its graduates now holding professorships at leading research universities in the USA and abroad where they, too, promulgate interdisciplinarity. Over the years, he organized statewide and international conferences on interdisciplinary neuroscience, and statewide workshops in selected areas of medical and biological engineering. For many years, he was also active in Arizona's various statewide networking strategies for interdisciplinary economic development, particularly in high-technology areas that pertain to bio-industry. Currently, as Regents' Professor Emeritus of Physiology he continues to work on movement neuroscience and to foster the careers of both senior and junior faculty and trainees from the high school to postdoctoral levels. He has truly been an inimitable force in fostering interdisciplinarity in training and research at both the University of Arizona and throughout the state.