In awarding grants CARDI expects applicants to show real engagement across disciplines. Whilst it makes good sense for researchers to use expertise from another academic area, CARDI expects applicants to go beyond separate or sequential pieces of work i.e. where people from two or more disciplines work on different parts of a research study at different times. It will fund projects in which there is active engagement by people from a variety of disciplines in a shared effort to solve the many complex issues that face older people and society generally. Examples of interdisciplinary research are spread through the text of this article to help clarify what it might mean in practice.