“The big problems of today will require the employment of multidisciplinary states. We must deploy more than one lens,” he said.

Suarez-Orozco said the $75,000, in addition to recent “gifts” from the Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and a private donor, will allow professors from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and many of Harvard’s graduates schools to “wrap their collective minds around scholarly puzzles.”

He said the money will fund new research on “the epidemical paradox” that immigrant children often have increased resistance to certain disease, gender relations of immigrant children and identifying the “skills and sensibilities” that make some immigrants more adaptable to new environments than others.

Doris Sommer, a professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures who will be actively involved in the new initative, said she plans to study “cultural agency,” which she defines as finding cultural mechanisms for attending to ethnic differences in today’s society.

Sommer said she and her colleagues have already begun formulating their agendas and that they hope to be able to hold a conference this spring.

But Suarez-Orozco is quick to point out that they still have a long way to go.

“The U.S. is the only industrial democracy where immigration is both history and destiny. This is really just the beginning—a point of departure for major research that needs to be done,” he said.

—Staff writer Jessica E. Vascellaro can be reached at vascell@fas.harvard.edu.