One of the ways the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study encourages interdisciplinary collaboration and connections is through research clusters. Clusters bring together scholars whose research will benefit significantly from an opportunity to collaborate intensively during a fellowship year. Special seminar series associated with clusters give fellows opportunities to interact with the larger Harvard and Boston communities, including students.

2009–2010

There will be two thematic clusters in the coming year: one in economics and another in mathematics. The economics cluster will develop a new method to evaluate the ways changes in the economic environment affect the welfare of individuals, while the mathematics cluster will explore dispersive wave phenomena from a nondeterministic viewpoint.

2007–2008

During 2007–2008, the Radcliffe Institute hosted two thematic clusters—groups of fellows who work both individually and collectively in their fields. One cluster studied the interactive visualization of musical structure, and the second studied Ethiopian cultural creativity.

See "What Field Are We Working in Now?" and "Cultural Creativity in the Ethiopian Diaspora"

2006–2007
 
For the first time, Radcliffe welcomed a cluster of scholars in the humanities. Four historians explored the promise and perils of biography as a mode for understanding the past.

See "Humanities Scholars Become a 'Wolf Pack'"

2005–2006
 
The 2005–2006 class of fellows included an interdisciplinary cluster exploring new logical foundations for linguistics, comprised of a computer scientist, a linguist, and a philosopher, and an economics cluster of labor economists and an historian. The economics cluster examined pipeline issues in higher education. The linguistics cluster worked on a book that aims to provide new logical foundations for theoretical linguistics by applying methods from model theory–the semantic side of mathematical logic–to problems in the formal description of natural languages.

See "Degrees of Success: Studying the Choices of Highly Educated Women"

2004–2005
 
The 2004–2005 fellowship year cluster focused on issues of unconscious prejudice and the law. The title of their work was "The Legal Design of Equality Based on the Science of Ordinary Prejudice."

See "Making Case for Concept of 'Implicit Prejudice'"

2003–2004
 
The 2003–2004 fellowship year hosted clusters on randomness and computation as well as immigration. The randomness and computation group examined questions such as: Is solving a problem more difficult than verifying a solution? Can any efficient process be efficiently reversed? Can one infer a global property of an object by inspecting a tiny portion of it?

See "Understanding Randomness"

The immigration cluster focused on the social and political impact of immigration on the United States and Western Europe. In particular, fellows examined labor experiences of the children of immigrants and the formation of racial and ethnic identities.

See "Crossing Borders"

2002–2003
 
The cosmology and theoretical physics cluster in the 2002–2003 fellowship year brought together "geographically disparate" physicists and astrophysicists to study phenomena such as how stars and planets are formed and how the surface of Mars is shaped.

See "The Universe as They Know It"