Are you sure you want to log out?
Review each tab of the Dossier.
You are a:
You have:
PROJECT:Unhealthy Eating Habits in Adult Obesity: A Multilevel Study. This program project will aim to improve current understanding of linkages among neurological, environmental and social mechanisms that trigger unhealthy eating behavior in obese adults. The same sample of obese adults will be tested in all three studies.
Simulation Objective
Assemble a team and find a funding opportunity for a Program Project Grant or Collaborative Award that can support the cross-disciplinary team that you need to study this problem. The project will be integrated thematically in such a way that the three individual research projects will synergize and yield greater results than would be expected if each project were conducted separately.
Project Timeline
Take a look at how long each step might take in a real world setting.
Room 1: Forming a Team
This relationship-building can take 3 weeks to 3 years.
Room 2: Identifying Funding and Proposal Submission
This typically takes 2 weeks to 6 months.
Room 3: Project Kick-off
This typically takes 1 month.
Room 4: Managing the Team
This will happen throughout the project.
Room 5: Evaluating Success Mid-Project
This typically takes a few months.
Glossary
P01 (PPG): The NIH Project Program Grant (P01) is "for the support of a broadly based, multidisciplinary, often long-term research program which has a specific major objective or a basic theme. A program project generally involves the organized efforts of relatively large groups, members of which are conducting research projects designed to elucidate the various aspects or components of this objective".
R01: "The [NIH] Research Project (R01) grant is an award made to support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing the investigator’s specific interest and competencies, based on the mission of the NIH. " The multiple projects that make up the PPG are each similar in size and scope to a stand-alone R01 funding mechanism. You’ll see R01 mentioned many times through the module, referring to the separate components of the PPG.
Information in the glossary from grants.nih.gov
Review each tab of the Dossier.
You are a:
You have:
PROJECT: Unhealthy Eating Habits in Adult Obesity: A Multilevel Study. This program project will aim to improve current understanding of linkages among neurological, environmental and social mechanisms that trigger unhealthy eating behavior in obese adults. The same sample of obese adults will be tested in all three studies.
Simulation Objective
Assemble a team and find a funding opportunity for a Program Project Grant or Collaborative Award that can support the cross-disciplinary team that you need to study this problem. The project will be integrated thematically in such a way that the three individual research projects will synergize and yield greater results than would be expected if each project were conducted separately.
Project Timeline
Take a look at how long each step might take in a real world setting.
Room 1: Forming a Team
This relationship-building can take 3 weeks to 3 years.
Room 2: Identifying Funding and Proposal Submission
This typically takes 2 weeks to 6 months.
Room 3: Project Kick-off
This typically takes 1 month.
Room 4: Managing the Team
This will happen throughout the project.
Room 5: Evaluating Success Mid-Project
This typically takes a few months.
Glossary
P01 (PPG): The NIH Project Program Grant (P01) is "for the support of a broadly based, multidisciplinary, often long-term research program which has a specific major objective or a basic theme. A program project generally involves the organized efforts of relatively large groups, members of which are conducting research projects designed to elucidate the various aspects or components of this objective.
R01: "The [NIH] Research Project (R01) grant is an award made to support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing the investigator’s specific interest and competencies, based on the mission of the NIH. " The multiple projects that make up the PPG are each similar in size and scope to a stand-alone R01 funding mechanism. You’ll see R01 mentioned many times through the module, referring to the separate components of the PPG.
Information in the glossary from grants.nih.gov
Quotes from this page are from a video transcript of experts discussing key considerations to keep in mind when selecting investigators for your team.
Additional expert information is available in The Science of Team Science (Module 1, Research Resource).
Consider scientific merit as well as how compatibly you can work with the researcher. Both factors are important!
"First of all, there is a very strong ethic [and this is] important in science, of merit. Choosing people on the basis of merit [is] what were committed to as scientists. And that makes sense; you don’t want to be choosing a collaborator on the basis of personal likes or dislikes, [as] that lends itself to [possibly] dismissing people who would otherwise be great scientific partners.
On the other hand, you need to pay some attention to the question of how compatibly can you work with someone else, and drawing the line between responding to people on the basis of irrelevant personal characteristics that don’t have anything to do with [completing] the science on the one hand, or, on the other hand, choosing people with whom you know you can work effectively&ndashthat’s not an easy line to draw.
We need to get scientists on both sides to pay more attention to that. And maybe you’ll want to continue working with someone who has great technical expertise, but you might alert each other to the fact there’s some potential areas of tension between you if you realize that you’re not matched well on some dimensions of [the] collaboration and that will give you something to work with.
I think people do that in other [interpersonal] relationships too. They may realize that there are some points where there is going to be some clashing between them, but theres enough in the relationship [to sustain it] that they’re willing to figure out some way of handling the areas in which they will clash."
—Howard Gadlin, PhD, National Institutes of Health: Ombudsman and Director of the Center for Cooperative Resolution; Authoring Team Science Field Guide with Michelle Bennett
Imposing structure, rather than engaging potential team members can lead to failure when assembling a team.
"So I have seen groups, or leaders, try to form a team without engaging the team. This is really problematic. Now it seems funny, right, [but] I’ve [had] people ask for me to come and meet with them about a new team initiative and they’ll have listed the people who they want to participate and I’ll say, "What happened when you went and talked with your colleagues about this? [And they will respond] "Oh, I haven’t talked to them yet.
Unlike the fantasy football leagues, fantasy scientific teams [are not] effective; nobody’s willing to bet on those, so that’s not fun either. You dont want to do that. You really want to start by engaging people and that happens sort of on a one-on-one [basis]. Now, it doesn’t mean you have to go in and engage every member of the potential team, but you have to go and talk [with someone]. You don’t want to build up this whole team, identify who you want, and then go to them and try and make that structure and impose it upon your potential collaborators and your potential team members. It’s not going to work. A team has to be developed, and it has to get buy-in from the members all along as it progresses.
If it’s coming top-down, then its more like a senior investigator with the trainees in his or her group and that’s not really what I see as a team of people working together towards a common goal from different perspectives looking to integrate things. So if they do the "fantasy science team, I don’t see that they’re ever going to [be successful] because they have already set in their minds exactly how they’d like to see things go and then they’re trying to fit other people into that mold. And other people are going [to respond], "Well why would I want to work on your project? I have to think about mine," and they don’t see it as a team endeavor."
—Holly Falk-Krzesinski, PhD, Northwestern University: Research Assistant Professor and Director, Research Team Support, Clinical and Translational Sciences (NUCATS) Institute, Feinberg School of Medicine; Chair, Annual International Science of Team Science Conference
Perceived interpersonal skills play a significant role in eventual success.
"It’s interesting, we have some data that looks at people’s perception of their interpersonal collaborative skills, in essence, or the way they perceive themselves [and] their capacity to engage&ndash so [in other words,] their perceived interpersonal collaboration [aptitude]. And when we look at that in the context of some outcomes, we see that people who are successful or perceive themselves as successful in interpersonal collaboration[s] have [a] greater number of publications, greater number of presentations, [and] a greater number of co-authors [on publications]. I think that what that’s indicating is that there’s a certain [degree] of collaborative-readiness [skill inherent in a person] that might be important in someone engaging in a team endeavor."
—Kara Hall, PhD, National Institutes of Health: National Cancer Institute, Program Officer, Behavioral Research Program
Teams should analyze why they are collaborating before they begin collaborating.
"Another area [of importance] is what we call "collaboration readiness. That’s actually a factor thats turned out to be enormously important in a lot of the projects that differentiate[s] success from failure. [The question we want the collaborators to ask themselves is] "Why are you collaborating?" And I’d say the riskiest way to launch a collaboration is [when] somebody tells you you have to.
And that’s very common with the funding agencies; increasingly, [the agencies] want projects that are collaborative [in nature] and those [projects] are the ones that are highest risk. But we want to understand better why people are collaborating and what their collaboration skills are like because not everybody’s a good collaborator. So this whole area [is what we refer to as] "collaboration readiness."
—Gary Olson, PhD, University of California-Irvine: Bren Professor of Information and Computer Sciences; University of Michigan: Professor Emeritus and Founder of the Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work (CREW)
Team members should fulfill very specific and clearly articulated roles.
"Teams that need to come together have to do so in order to meet the technical requirements of the task at hand. So clearly, you’ll need to have people on teams that have the skills, the expertise, and the methodologies that are necessary to accomplish the task. But there are other intangibles that play a very important part in why teams come together. Some [of these] have to do with the individuals on the team, and some have to do with the relationships amongst the individuals on the team. You need to have a team where somebody is a visionary and where somebody has the positive imagination to ask the challenging questions. You also need to have people on the team who play other roles. You need to have someone on the team who is going to be challenging those questions, who is going to be asking questions about it, and who is going to be skeptical about the visionary. On the other hand, you need to have people on the team who are ready to build momentum, that is, to take a visionary idea and to be able to see how one goes about trying to tactically implement those ideas. These are some of the roles that you need to make sure you have on the team."
—Noshir Contractor, PhD, Northwestern University: Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences, Communication Studies, and Management and Organizations
Quotes from this page are from a video transcript of experts discussing key considerations to keep in mind when selecting investigators for your team.
Additional expert information is available in The Science of Team Science (Module 1, Research Resource).
Consider scientific merit as well as how compatibly you can work with the researcher. Both factors are important!
"First of all, there is a very strong ethic [and this is] important in science, of merit. Choosing people on the basis of merit [is] what were committed to as scientists. And that makes sense; you don’t want to be choosing a collaborator on the basis of personal likes or dislikes, [as] that lends itself to [possibly] dismissing people who would otherwise be great scientific partners.
On the other hand, you need to pay some attention to the question of how compatibly can you work with someone else, and drawing the line between responding to people on the basis of irrelevant personal characteristics that don’t have anything to do with [completing] the science on the one hand, or, on the other hand, choosing people with whom you know you can work effectively&ndashthat’s not an easy line to draw.
We need to get scientists on both sides to pay more attention to that. And maybe you’ll want to continue working with someone who has great technical expertise, but you might alert each other to the fact there’s some potential areas of tension between you if you realize that you’re not matched well on some dimensions of [the] collaboration and that will give you something to work with.
I think people do that in other [interpersonal] relationships too. They may realize that there are some points where there is going to be some clashing between them, but theres enough in the relationship [to sustain it] that they’re willing to figure out some way of handling the areas in which they will clash."
—Howard Gadlin, PhD, National Institutes of Health: Ombudsman and Director of the Center for Cooperative Resolution; Authoring Team Science Field Guide with Michelle Bennett
Imposing structure, rather than engaging potential team members can lead to failure when assembling a team.
"So I have seen groups, or leaders, try to form a team without engaging the team. This is really problematic. Now it seems funny, right, [but] I’ve [had] people ask for me to come and meet with them about a new team initiative and they’ll have listed the people who they want to participate and I’ll say, "What happened when you went and talked with your colleagues about this? [And they will respond] "Oh, I haven’t talked to them yet.
Unlike the fantasy football leagues, fantasy scientific teams [are not] effective; nobody’s willing to bet on those, so that’s not fun either. You dont want to do that. You really want to start by engaging people and that happens sort of on a one-on-one [basis]. Now, it doesn’t mean you have to go in and engage every member of the potential team, but you have to go and talk [with someone]. You don’t want to build up this whole team, identify who you want, and then go to them and try and make that structure and impose it upon your potential collaborators and your potential team members. It’s not going to work. A team has to be developed, and it has to get buy-in from the members all along as it progresses.
If it’s coming top-down, then its more like a senior investigator with the trainees in his or her group and that’s not really what I see as a team of people working together towards a common goal from different perspectives looking to integrate things. So if they do the "fantasy science team, I don’t see that they’re ever going to [be successful] because they have already set in their minds exactly how they’d like to see things go and then they’re trying to fit other people into that mold. And other people are going [to respond], "Well why would I want to work on your project? I have to think about mine," and they don’t see it as a team endeavor."
—Holly Falk-Krzesinski, PhD, Northwestern University: Research Assistant Professor and Director, Research Team Support, Clinical and Translational Sciences (NUCATS) Institute, Feinberg School of Medicine; Chair, Annual International Science of Team Science Conference
Perceived interpersonal skills play a significant role in eventual success.
"It’s interesting, we have some data that looks at people’s perception of their interpersonal collaborative skills, in essence, or the way they perceive themselves [and] their capacity to engage&ndash so [in other words,] their perceived interpersonal collaboration [aptitude]. And when we look at that in the context of some outcomes, we see that people who are successful or perceive themselves as successful in interpersonal collaboration[s] have [a] greater number of publications, greater number of presentations, [and] a greater number of co-authors [on publications]. I think that what that’s indicating is that there’s a certain [degree] of collaborative-readiness [skill inherent in a person] that might be important in someone engaging in a team endeavor."
—Kara Hall, PhD, National Institutes of Health: National Cancer Institute, Program Officer, Behavioral Research Program
Teams should analyze why they are collaborating before they begin collaborating.
"Another area [of importance] is what we call "collaboration readiness. That’s actually a factor thats turned out to be enormously important in a lot of the projects that differentiate[s] success from failure. [The question we want the collaborators to ask themselves is] "Why are you collaborating?" And I’d say the riskiest way to launch a collaboration is [when] somebody tells you you have to.
And that’s very common with the funding agencies; increasingly, [the agencies] want projects that are collaborative [in nature] and those [projects] are the ones that are highest risk. But we want to understand better why people are collaborating and what their collaboration skills are like because not everybody’s a good collaborator. So this whole area [is what we refer to as] "collaboration readiness."
—Gary Olson, PhD, University of California-Irvine: Bren Professor of Information and Computer Sciences; University of Michigan: Professor Emeritus and Founder of the Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work (CREW)
Team members should fulfill very specific and clearly articulated roles.
"Teams that need to come together have to do so in order to meet the technical requirements of the task at hand. So clearly, you’ll need to have people on teams that have the skills, the expertise, and the methodologies that are necessary to accomplish the task. But there are other intangibles that play a very important part in why teams come together. Some [of these] have to do with the individuals on the team, and some have to do with the relationships amongst the individuals on the team. You need to have a team where somebody is a visionary and where somebody has the positive imagination to ask the challenging questions. You also need to have people on the team who play other roles. You need to have someone on the team who is going to be challenging those questions, who is going to be asking questions about it, and who is going to be skeptical about the visionary. On the other hand, you need to have people on the team who are ready to build momentum, that is, to take a visionary idea and to be able to see how one goes about trying to tactically implement those ideas. These are some of the roles that you need to make sure you have on the team."
—Noshir Contractor, PhD, Northwestern University: Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences, Communication Studies, and Management and Organizations
Click each funding opportunity to view additional information. Then, click Choose to select the funding opportunity best suited for the research your team would like to conduct. (Remember, you can view your Dossier at any time for a refresher on project specifics.)
"You’ve consulted with the other two PIs and narrowed your options for funding opportunities. Now it’s time to identify the optimal funding opportunity for your team to pursue. Select the best choice from the provided options."
An NIH program project grant (P01) is more complex in scope and budget than an individual research grant. For this specific grant opportunity, there are submission dates every 6 months. Individual research grants are awarded to support the work of one principal investigator who, with supporting staff, addresses a scientific problem. In contrast, program project grants are available to a group of several investigators with differing areas of expertise who wish to collaborate on a shared project by pooling their talents and resources. Program project grants are expected to synergize research programs in order to achieve results not attainable by investigators working independently. The program project grant is organized around a set of closely interrelated projects bearing on a well-defined scientific problem. Normally, three to five projects are involved, with one scientist designated by the applicant institution as the principal investigator who bears responsibility for the scientific and fiscal management of the program project grant.It is expected that each of the collaborating scientists responsible for the individual projects will be an independent investigator. Investigators from more than one department, administrative unit, or institution may be represented.
Great! That’s right! The active NIH program project (P01) is the optimal funding opportunity to pursue. It allows for three separate R01s, each focused on a different aspect of food choices in adult obesity. You’ve completed this activity. Close this overlay, and click the Next button to return to the room.
NSF does not normally support research with disease- or health-related goals, including work on the etiology, diagnosis or treatment of physical or mental disease, abnormality, or malfunction in human beings or animals. Animal models of diseases or the development or testing of drugs or other procedures for their treatment also are not eligible for support.However, research in bioengineering, with diagnosis- or treatment-related goals, that applies engineering principles to problems in biology and medicine while advancing engineering knowledge is eligible for support. Bioengineering research to aid persons with disabilities also is eligible.
Not quite. A Collaborative NSF grant is not as good a choice as the NIH P01 because NSF generally doesn’t support health and biomedical research. A health problem—eating and activity behaviors that promote obesity—is the shared focus across the studies in this transdisciplinary research. Close this overlay, and try again.
Foundation grants generally strive to fund endeavors that are distinctive, novel, and not eligible for funding by other sources. For example, the W. M. Keck Foundation Grant encourages projects that are high-risk with the potential for transformative impact, but not eligible for funding by federal or private sources."High-risk" comprises a number of factors, including questions that push the edge of the field, present unconventional approaches to intractable problems, or challenge the prevailing paradigm."Transformative" may mean creation of a new field of research, development of new instrumentation enabling observations not previously possible, or discovery of knowledge that challenges prevailing perspectives.
Not quite. The Foundation Grant wasn’t preferable because these funders explicitly want work that is outside the mission of public funding agencies (NIH and NSF) and is highly transformative.Close this overlay, and try again.
When seeking a funding opportunity, it’s generally recommended that you choose one with a deadline at least 6 months away from the time you first learn about it in order to allow your team enough time to properly prepare your submission. Giving your team less than six months creates very difficult parameters for creating an appropriately thorough and effective submission.
Additional expert information is available in The Science of Team Science (Module 1, Research Resource).
Having read the grant announcement, your team jumps in and starts to write the proposal. Although a careful reading of the announcement is essential, a conversation with the Program Officer at the funding agency can provide some valuable insight. Without it, your team could be at a significant disadvantage. In the video transcript below, Holly Falk-Krzesinski, PhD, explains the purpose and benefits to talking to the Program Officer before drafting the grant proposal.
"[What is essential is] making sure that your goals align with the mission of the [funding] agency. And in some cases it’s[a matter of not only taking into consideration your project’s] alignment with the mission of the agency, but also the mission of] the directorate, division, institute or center as well as the program within [those subsets]. I encourage people all the time [that if you think] you want a grant from somebody else, you have to keep in mind you are not entitled to their money. I don’t care how brilliant you are as a scientist. I don’t care how much international acclaim you have received and how many publications [you have]; [remember,] you are not entitled to [the agency’s] money, and they only have a limited amount of it.
You have to convince them that your project is worthy, and work in partnership with them. And so I tell people [to not] even consider applying for any kind of funding—most assuredly for an interdisciplinary research team-based project—without speaking to program officers at the agencies. Whether it be a foundation, a corporate foundation, or a federal funding agenc[y in question], you have to develop those relationships. You have to talk, you have to get advice back about [what] direction the agency would like [out of their projects]. I’m not saying that you go and fabricate some project, or that you go in an entirely different direction [just] because somebody doesn’t like what you’re looking to do. Oftentimes what you can do is you start by working with one program officer and they say ’That’s not really in our portfolio, but if you call up my buddy two doors down from me, I think she’ll be wildly excited." The reason for that is they’re program officers –they know an awful lot about each other’s portfolios which we’ll never know if we don’t actually talk to them.
I find this [reluctance to speak with the agency] to be problematic. Some junior faculty don’t understand that they’re really allowed to do this; senior faculty sort of get in the rut sometimes of just doing their own thing and [get] so used to getting funded for their own thing that they forget that they have to redevelop these relationship[s with the funding agencies]. But the most important thing you can do if you want to get funded is to have the discussion with the program officer—and earlier is better. And have [your dialogue] be bi-directional. The fact is I’ve always seen the science get better, the question become more robust and richer, and the approach [grow] even more exciting when you’re also talking with the agency who is interested in the outcome and working in partnership."
—Holly Falk-Krzesinski, PhD, Northwestern University: Research Assistant Professor and Director, Research Team Support, Clinical and Translational Sciences (NUCATS) Institute, Feinberg School of Medicine; Chair, Annual International Science of Team Science Conference
Which of the following questions would you like to ask the Program Officer on your telephone call? You may choose as many or as few questions as you would like.
Well thought-out inquires will lead to a better informed project proposal, which helps your chances of securing funding. Remember to ask the Program Officer at the funding agency about agency priorities, timeline and appropriate methodology. In the video transcript below, Holly Falk-Krzesinski, PhD, explains the purpose and benefits to talking to the Program Officer before drafting the grant proposal.
"[What is essential is] making sure that your goals align with the mission of the [funding] agency. And in some cases it’s [a matter of not only taking into consideration your project’s] alignment with the mission of the agency, but also the mission of] the directorate, division, institute or center as well as the program within [those subsets]. I encourage people all the time [that if you think] you want a grant from somebody else, you have to keep in mind you are not entitled to their money. I don’t care how brilliant you are as a scientist. I don’t care how much international acclaim you have received and how many publications [you have]; [remember,] you are not entitled to [the agency’s] money, and they only have a limited amount of it.
You have to convince them that your project is worthy, and work in partnership with them. And so I tell people [to not] even consider applying for any kind of funding—most assuredly for an interdisciplinary research team-based project—without speaking to program officers at the agencies. Whether it be a foundation, a corporate foundation, or a federal funding agenc[y in question], you have to develop those relationships. You have to talk, you have to get advice back about [what] direction the agency would like [out of their projects]. I’m not saying that you go and fabricate some project, or that you go in an entirely different direction [just] because somebody doesn’t like what you’re looking to do. Oftentimes what you can do is you start by working with one program officer and they say ‘That’s not really in our portfolio, but if you call up my buddy two doors down from me, I think she’ll be wildly excited."The reason for that is they’re program officers—they know an awful lot about each other’s portfolios which we’ll never know if we don’t actually talk to them.
I find this [reluctance to speak with the agency] to be problematic. Some junior faculty don’t understand that they’re really allowed to do this; senior faculty sort of get in the rut sometimes of just doing their own thing and [get] so used to getting funded for their own thing that they forget that they have to redevelop these relationship[s with the funding agencies]. But the most important thing you can do if you want to get funded is to have the discussion with the program office—and earlier is better. And have [your dialogue] be bi-directional. The fact is I’ve always seen the science get better, the question become more robust and richer, and the approach [grow] even more exciting when you’re also talking with the agency who is interested in the outcome and working in partnership."
—Holly Falk-Krzesinski, PhD, Northwestern University: Research Assistant Professor and Director, Research Team Support, Clinical and Translational Sciences (NUCATS) Institute, Feinberg School of Medicine; Chair, Annual International Science of Team Science Conference
The grant you’re applying for allows for $1,500,000 a year in direct costs. Direct costs are funds at the research team’s disposal, as opposed to indirect costs that go directly to the team’s research institution(s).
Before the grant proposal can be submitted, you must work with the other PIs to create a budget. Allocating the appropriate funds to each R01 project and the specific cores can be challenging. Click on each node to review some best practices to keep in mind as you allocate resources.
Here are some best practices for allocating resources:
Thoroughly read the grant requirements. Does your $1.5 million annual budgetary allowance include both direct and indirect costs? There’s a big difference!
Involve all project leaders from your team in the budgeting process. Keep everything as transparent as possible. Note: Opinions vary about whether to share information about individual salaries.
A core is a shared facility that supports more than one research project on the grant. Don’t just budget for your research projects; budget for your cores. Shared Facilities/Cores should include costs for personnel, equipment, and supplies.
An Administrative Core is essential for a complex grant that includes several different research projects. Generally, no more than 10-12% of the budget should be allocated to the Administrative Core. Expenses for the administrative core will include personnel, capital equipment, operating expenses, pilot project funding, team coordination, seminars/conferences, supplies, travel, etc. Other cores will vary considerably depending on their nature and number of projects they serve, however, cores are generally funded at levels lower than research projects. A standard research project would be funded at a level of $175-$250K direct costs a year.
Many large collaborative grants include a Statistics Core. This core usually supports the effort of several statisticians and data analysts who support the analysis of data from several projects.
A Bioassay Assay Core covers personnel and supplies needed to collect and sometimes also to assay biological specimens from participants.
Career development cores generally include resources to support some combination of individuals (stipend, tuition, supplies, travel, health insurance) and activities (course development, tuition costs, faculty course buy-out time).
The project will last several years, so budget with the assumption that personnel will receive appropriate raises.
It’s important that you don’t take a cookie-cutter approach to budgeting. Instead of just divvying the budget up equally across projects, think about the unique circumstances of each project that could require extra funds.
For example, the projects in this simulation might have high costs for the Neuroimaging Study because of capital equipment expenditures or because of the high cost of scanner time. And there may be high costs for the various technologies used to localize and track a person’s food choices for the Environmental Food Cue Study. Ultimately, you want to make sure there are funds necessary to support the work that needs to be completed.
"Face-to-face interaction is absolutely essential for all of what is happening in Team Science. There is pretty good research that shows that even though we now live in a world where we have all of these technologies and have the ability to communicate, collaborate, and coordinate with people anytime, any place. We in fact spend most of our time communicating, collaborating, [and] coordinating with people who are geographically proximate to us. And that holds true because we forget that technologies are not simply a substitute [for] face-to-face communication, but are actually supporting face-to-face communication. In many cases, if you look at teams that are working, most of [their] communication is with people who are geographically proximate with [them] and [they] use these techonologies to actually facilitate and make more efficient the times when [they] do engage in face-to-face collaboration and face-to-face communication.
Going back several years, there was research that shows that in order for a team to be effective, it is really helpful if they [come] together face to face before they beg[in] their project, if they [come] together face-to-face during the course of the project, and that these face-to-face encounters have an intangible benefit that provides both a lubricant [and] the trust that’s necessary to engage in research. When you’re doing team science research there is a sense of honorability because you’re often putting ideas that are half-baked ideas, ideas that you’re thinking through that have not yet been constructed well, and the way to help other people build these ideas with you is to have a lot of trust within the team. The trust within the team comes most from face-to-face interactions. And in the absence of face-to-face interactions, teams have a very difficult time being able to engage in creative tasks."
—Noshir Contractor, PhD, Northwestern University: Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences, Communication Studies, and Management and Organizations
At the kickoff meeting, one of the PIs suggests creating a written collaborator agreement (e.g., a document that could outline team expectations, goals, collaborator roles and reponsibilites, authorship specifics, as well as conflict and communication plans).
There are two choices for the best course of action, as follows:
Often, the best time to resolve a conflict is before it’s occurred. The start of a collaboration is a great time to get everyone on the same page to help ensure a smoother process later. To view the questions, the NIH Ombudsman’s Office recommends that teams answer before a collaboration begins, complete the following:
"[It is a good idea to put] together a document that the leadership can follow or to at least be mindful of as they bring somebody into the institution that says ‘Well, you can have some of our resources, you can access some of these resources at another institute.’ But [it is equally important to make] sure that the conversations are taking place very early about roles, responsibilities, expectations, how [resources are] going to be accessed, how resources could be reviewed over time. Some of these things [may be] helpful to talk about up front [and to] put on the table so that [they don’t] come back to bite you in a couple of years when something starts falling apart and somebody might not feel like they know who to go to to resolve an issue. [It’s a good idea for you to] actually have something written in place that you can point to and say ‘Okay, well, we need to talk about this because it’s not working.’"
—L. Michelle Bennett, PhD, National Institutes of Health: Deputy Director, Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute; Authoring Team Science Field Guide with Howard Gadlin
Several cyberinfrastructure tools are available to researchers, regardless of whether they’re looking to introduce new collaborators or simply to facilitate efforts on an existing team.
Here are a few categories of tools with examples of each:
An Intranet is a private computer network that uses the Internet securely—usually by way of log-in and password requirements—to share information among an established group of people. An Intranet site can serve as a central repository for team documents as well as a forum in which all communication among team members takes place. These features ensure that all members have access to the group’s data and correspondence.
Collaboration sites such as Basecamp (http://basecamphq.com) and activeCollab (http://www.activecollab.com) are examples of Intranet sites that teams might use.
There are many available tools for video conferencing. Consider your budgetary requirements and the needed functionality (i.e., do you want team members to share their computer screens and/or documents, or do you simply want everyone to see the person they are speaking with).
Some available options include:
Often, the best time to resolve a conflict is before it’s occurred. The start of a collaboration is a great time to get everyone on the same page to help ensure a smoother process later. To view the questions, the NIH Ombudsman’s Office recommends that teams answer before a collaboration begins, complete the following:
Quotes on this page are from a video transcript of Howard Gadlin, PhD, National Institutes of Health: Ombudsman and Director of the Center for Cooperative Resolution; Authoring Team Science Field Guide with Michelle Bennett
Additional expert information is available in The Science of Team Science (Module 1, Research Resource).
Use defining documents from the beginning to create the groundwork to avoid conflict throughout your study.
"When you’re first bringing together people who are coming out of different disciplines, or different perspectives or different cultures, or whatever it may be, you’re struck by difference. That’s the first thing that people are experiencing. And sometime when people first experience difference they get into a kind of defensive mode in which they have to sort of reassert for themselves the supposed superiority of their way and they might feel threatened rather than intrigued by the differences. So what you want to do is keep people from moving into that kind of defensive mode and make them more interested than defensive about the differences, and create the grounds in which they can begin to build something enriching on the basis of those differences--and differences really can be enriching as anyone who has been bored knows.
I’ve become, through doing this work, a strong advocate of the idea of people, at the beginning of a collaboration, establishing a clear understanding between them about how they will work together, what their expectations are of one another, how data will be exchanged, how they will make decisions about authorship, what kind of communication processes [they will use]—I mean, we jokingly refer to having prenuptial arrangements.
First of all, the very process of thinking about what you want in your collaborative agreement at the outset makes you be explicit to yourself, as well as your colleagues, about what your expectations are. Sometimes people aren’t even full aware themselves of what their expectations are; they just assume that the person with whom they are collaborating with is like them in some fundamental way and will want the same kinds of things. Becoming more aware yourself as a collaborator, of what’s important to you, and how you want to be working, and then getting an agreement. The best time to resolve a conflict is before it has occurred—you’re always getting along well at the beginning of a relationship; it’s very much like life. So that’s time to decide how to handle conflicts should they arise.
We have a template of—I think it’s now 18 questions—generic kinds of questions that seem to apply for many collaborations. And we circulate [those] to scientists who are beginning collaborations and suggest that they try to answer those questions.
I think one [of the 18 questions] is about decision mechanism for authorship; you can always decide at the onset because you don’t know whose contribution will be the most significant and will warrant it. But you ought to have in place some agreement about how you will make that decision. I say that is number one in some way, and the rest depends on the specific kinds of collaboration. Certainly if there’s going to be any chance of data [being generated] what the expectations are with respect to that ought to be clearly spelled out."
Mentorship and authorship conflicts are the most common.
"Well, there are two major categories of conflicts that we see over and over again. One [revolves] around issues of authorship and credit and research. The other [involves] various complications in relationships between mentors and the people they are mentoring. Those recur over and over again and those kinds of issues are brought to us on the one hand from postdocs who are having their mentors, and on the other hand from mentors who are having problems with their postdocs. Conflict that’s most common is conflict over first authorship.
A lot of one’s reputation is built around having one’s name as the lead author on significant scientific papers, so when people are collaborating there’s sometimes competition for who will be the person who gets to claim the first author position. In terms of mentors and postdocs, there’s not a single kind that stands out more than others. Sometimes people feel they’re not being given enough guidance, sometimes they feel they’re getting too much guidance and being micromanaged, sometimes it’s a poor working relationship, sometimes there are problems within a lab because there’s competition among different postdocs for the attention and favor of the Principal Investigator for the lab. It would take a long time to catalogue all the different ways in which the mentor-postdoc relationship can go off course."
Idea-driven conflict can be productive. Groups lacking conflict may also lack creativity or real growth.
"We [at the NIH Center for Cooperative Resolution] are not anti-conflict, okay; as much as we talk about conflict resolution, and resolving conflicts, it’s important [to keep in mind that] science is about conflict. Science is about disagreement. Disagreement is a kind of conflict. What you want to do is create the conditions in which people can disagree with the disagreement. The conflict is focusing on substantive scientific issues—not on personal style, or who said what, or who might get credit, or whatever it may be. And it’s really important to create the conditions in a lab or in a team or in a collaboration where multiple opinions can thrive—When that’s appropriate. [You should create the conditions] where people can take different perspectives, whether they’re discussing the methods to be employed, the instruments to be used, the analysis of data, [or] the interpretation of results. You want all of those ideas floating around and you want those conflicts resolved on the basis of the strength of the data-supported arguments that can be marshaled for them. So that’s good conflict, and, I think, that in a successful scientific collaboration or scientific team, part of the excitement for people is the idea that they can disagree like that without it becoming personal—without it falling off into being a personal dispute—where winning isn’t really what matters. And those are real privileged moments when you have that, and again it’s like [interpersonal] relationships. Having a friend with whom you can have a really intense discussion about something that matters to both of you is a very special kind of thing.
There are some challenges in inter-disciplinary teams that might be different, but also the very fact that they’re interdisciplinary creates the opportunity for multiple perspectives. So if you can get the people involved in the team from the different disciplines to see what an opportunity is. ([e.g.,] ‘How will someone who’s coming from this field see the results that are coming out of the work that I produced in our collaboration? What will it mean to them?’) It doesn’t hurt you [at all] to be curious about what you’ve done [and what that] means to someone else because it’s certainly not likely to mean the same to them that it means to you. So that’s where the potential is."
It can be helpful for teams to seek out an objective third party to help facilitate conflict resolution.
"In almost any group there’s someone to whom you can go and talk about problems. Getting another perspective on an issue [is important] if you have someone who you have confidence will be honest with you, won’t automatically take your side, and is willing [to] be critical if you deserve it but will not automatically side with the other people. [This should be] someone who you trust in that way. At least having the opportunity to talk about [group problems] with someone within the team if possible, or outside the team, [is ideal]. [In] most organizations there’s someone around to whom you can go for some kind of guidance. And there are interesting guidelines that people can find for how to engage in difficult conversations—including a couple of books with something like that in the title. And one can coach oneself about how to handle a difficult situation. One thing that a lot of people don’t think to do when they’re unhappy in the situation is to prepare before they go into the conversation in which they’re going to try to talk about it. It makes sense to sort of think strategically, [to ask yourself] ‘What am I really trying to accomplish in this conversation?’ [Ask yourself] how can [you] do it in a way that will increase the chances that the person [you] want to talk to might actually hear what [you’re] saying and not become defensive, and sort of practice before going in."
Quotes on this page are from a video transcript of Howard Gadlin, PhD, National Institutes of Health: Ombudsman and Director of the Center for Cooperative Resolution; Authoring Team Science Field Guide with Michelle Bennett
Additional expert information is available in The Science of Team Science (Module 1, Research Resource).
Use defining documents from the beginning to create the groundwork to avoid conflict throughout your study.
"When you’re first bringing together people who are coming out of different disciplines, or different perspectives or different cultures, or whatever it may be, you’re struck by difference. That’s the first thing that people are experiencing. And sometime when people first experience difference they get into a kind of defensive mode in which they have to sort of reassert for themselves the supposed superiority of their way and they might feel threatened rather than intrigued by the differences. So what you want to do is keep people from moving into that kind of defensive mode and make them more interested than defensive about the differences, and create the grounds in which they can begin to build something enriching on the basis of those differences--and differences really can be enriching as anyone who has been bored knows.
I’ve become, through doing this work, a strong advocate of the idea of people, at the beginning of a collaboration, establishing a clear understanding between them about how they will work together, what their expectations are of one another, how data will be exchanged, how they will make decisions about authorship, what kind of communication processes [they will use]—I mean, we jokingly refer to having prenuptial arrangements.
First of all, the very process of thinking about what you want in your collaborative agreement at the outset makes you be explicit to yourself, as well as your colleagues, about what your expectations are. Sometimes people aren’t even full aware themselves of what their expectations are; they just assume that the person with whom they are collaborating with is like them in some fundamental way and will want the same kinds of things. Becoming more aware yourself as a collaborator, of what’s important to you, and how you want to be working, and then getting an agreement. The best time to resolve a conflict is before it has occurred—you’re always getting along well at the beginning of a relationship; it’s very much like life. So that’s time to decide how to handle conflicts should they arise.
We have a template of—I think it’s now 18 questions—generic kinds of questions that seem to apply for many collaborations. And we circulate [those] to scientists who are beginning collaborations and suggest that they try to answer those questions.
I think one [of the 18 questions] is about decision mechanism for authorship; you can always decide at the onset because you don’t know whose contribution will be the most significant and will warrant it. But you ought to have in place some agreement about how you will make that decision. I say that is number one in some way, and the rest depends on the specific kinds of collaboration. Certainly if there’s going to be any chance of data [being generated] what the expectations are with respect to that ought to be clearly spelled out."
Mentorship and authorship conflicts are the most common.
"Well, there are two major categories of conflicts that we see over and over again. One [revolves] around issues of authorship and credit and research. The other [involves] various complications in relationships between mentors and the people they are mentoring. Those recur over and over again and those kinds of issues are brought to us on the one hand from postdocs who are having their mentors, and on the other hand from mentors who are having problems with their postdocs. Conflict that’s most common is conflict over first authorship.
A lot of one’s reputation is built around having one’s name as the lead author on significant scientific papers, so when people are collaborating there’s sometimes competition for who will be the person who gets to claim the first author position. In terms of mentors and postdocs, there’s not a single kind that stands out more than others. Sometimes people feel they’re not being given enough guidance, sometimes they feel they’re getting too much guidance and being micromanaged, sometimes it’s a poor working relationship, sometimes there are problems within a lab because there’s competition among different postdocs for the attention and favor of the Principal Investigator for the lab. It would take a long time to catalogue all the different ways in which the mentor-postdoc relationship can go off course."
Idea-driven conflict can be productive. Groups lacking conflict may also lack creativity or real growth.
"We [at the NIH Center for Cooperative Resolution] are not anti-conflict, okay; as much as we talk about conflict resolution, and resolving conflicts, it’s important [to keep in mind that] science is about conflict. Science is about disagreement. Disagreement is a kind of conflict. What you want to do is create the conditions in which people can disagree with the disagreement. The conflict is focusing on substantive scientific issues—not on personal style, or who said what, or who might get credit, or whatever it may be. And it’s really important to create the conditions in a lab or in a team or in a collaboration where multiple opinions can thrive—When that’s appropriate. [You should create the conditions] where people can take different perspectives, whether they’re discussing the methods to be employed, the instruments to be used, the analysis of data, [or] the interpretation of results. You want all of those ideas floating around and you want those conflicts resolved on the basis of the strength of the data-supported arguments that can be marshaled for them. So that’s good conflict, and, I think, that in a successful scientific collaboration or scientific team, part of the excitement for people is the idea that they can disagree like that without it becoming personal—without it falling off into being a personal dispute—where winning isn’t really what matters. And those are real privileged moments when you have that, and again it’s like [interpersonal] relationships. Having a friend with whom you can have a really intense discussion about something that matters to both of you is a very special kind of thing.
There are some challenges in inter-disciplinary teams that might be different, but also the very fact that they’re interdisciplinary creates the opportunity for multiple perspectives. So if you can get the people involved in the team from the different disciplines to see what an opportunity is. ([e.g.,] ‘How will someone who’s coming from this field see the results that are coming out of the work that I produced in our collaboration? What will it mean to them?’) It doesn’t hurt you [at all] to be curious about what you’ve done [and what that] means to someone else because it’s certainly not likely to mean the same to them that it means to you. So that’s where the potential is."
It can be helpful for teams to seek out an objective third party to help facilitate conflict resolution.
"In almost any group there’s someone to whom you can go and talk about problems. Getting another perspective on an issue [is important] if you have someone who you have confidence will be honest with you, won’t automatically take your side, and is willing [to] be critical if you deserve it but will not automatically side with the other people. [This should be] someone who you trust in that way. At least having the opportunity to talk about [group problems] with someone within the team if possible, or outside the team, [is ideal]. [In] most organizations there’s someone around to whom you can go for some kind of guidance. And there are interesting guidelines that people can find for how to engage in difficult conversations—including a couple of books with something like that in the title. And one can coach oneself about how to handle a difficult situation. One thing that a lot of people don’t think to do when they’re unhappy in the situation is to prepare before they go into the conversation in which they’re going to try to talk about it. It makes sense to sort of think strategically, [to ask yourself] ‘What am I really trying to accomplish in this conversation?’ [Ask yourself] how can [you] do it in a way that will increase the chances that the person [you] want to talk to might actually hear what [you’re] saying and not become defensive, and sort of practice before going in."
Often, the best time to resolve a conflict is before it’s occurred. The start of a collaboration is a great time to get everyone on the same page to help ensure a smoother process later. To view the questions, the NIH Ombudsman’s Office recommends that teams answer before a collaboration begins, complete the following:
Quotes on this page are from a video transcript of Howard Gadlin, PhD, National Institutes of Health: Ombudsman and Director of the Center for Cooperative Resolution; Authoring Team Science Field Guide with Michelle Bennett
Additional expert information is available in The Science of Team Science (Module 1, Research Resource).
Use defining documents from the beginning to create the groundwork to avoid conflict throughout your study.
"When you’re first bringing together people who are coming out of different disciplines, or different perspectives or different cultures, or whatever it may be, you’re struck by difference. That’s the first thing that people are experiencing. And sometime when people first experience difference they get into a kind of defensive mode in which they have to sort of reassert for themselves the supposed superiority of their way and they might feel threatened rather than intrigued by the differences. So what you want to do is keep people from moving into that kind of defensive mode and make them more interested than defensive about the differences, and create the grounds in which they can begin to build something enriching on the basis of those differences--and differences really can be enriching as anyone who has been bored knows.
I’ve become, through doing this work, a strong advocate of the idea of people, at the beginning of a collaboration, establishing a clear understanding between them about how they will work together, what their expectations are of one another, how data will be exchanged, how they will make decisions about authorship, what kind of communication processes [they will use]—I mean, we jokingly refer to having prenuptial arrangements.
First of all, the very process of thinking about what you want in your collaborative agreement at the outset makes you be explicit to yourself, as well as your colleagues, about what your expectations are. Sometimes people aren’t even full aware themselves of what their expectations are; they just assume that the person with whom they are collaborating with is like them in some fundamental way and will want the same kinds of things. Becoming more aware yourself as a collaborator, of what’s important to you, and how you want to be working, and then getting an agreement. The best time to resolve a conflict is before it has occurred—you’re always getting along well at the beginning of a relationship; it’s very much like life. So that’s time to decide how to handle conflicts should they arise.
We have a template of—I think it’s now 18 questions—generic kinds of questions that seem to apply for many collaborations. And we circulate [those] to scientists who are beginning collaborations and suggest that they try to answer those questions.
I think one [of the 18 questions] is about decision mechanism for authorship; you can always decide at the onset because you don’t know whose contribution will be the most significant and will warrant it. But you ought to have in place some agreement about how you will make that decision. I say that is number one in some way, and the rest depends on the specific kinds of collaboration. Certainly if there’s going to be any chance of data [being generated] what the expectations are with respect to that ought to be clearly spelled out."
Mentorship and authorship conflicts are the most common.
"Well, there are two major categories of conflicts that we see over and over again. One [revolves] around issues of authorship and credit and research. The other [involves] various complications in relationships between mentors and the people they are mentoring. Those recur over and over again and those kinds of issues are brought to us on the one hand from postdocs who are having their mentors, and on the other hand from mentors who are having problems with their postdocs. Conflict that’s most common is conflict over first authorship.
A lot of one’s reputation is built around having one’s name as the lead author on significant scientific papers, so when people are collaborating there’s sometimes competition for who will be the person who gets to claim the first author position. In terms of mentors and postdocs, there’s not a single kind that stands out more than others. Sometimes people feel they’re not being given enough guidance, sometimes they feel they’re getting too much guidance and being micromanaged, sometimes it’s a poor working relationship, sometimes there are problems within a lab because there’s competition among different postdocs for the attention and favor of the Principal Investigator for the lab. It would take a long time to catalogue all the different ways in which the mentor-postdoc relationship can go off course."
Idea-driven conflict can be productive. Groups lacking conflict may also lack creativity or real growth.
"We [at the NIH Center for Cooperative Resolution] are not anti-conflict, okay; as much as we talk about conflict resolution, and resolving conflicts, it’s important [to keep in mind that] science is about conflict. Science is about disagreement. Disagreement is a kind of conflict. What you want to do is create the conditions in which people can disagree with the disagreement. The conflict is focusing on substantive scientific issues—not on personal style, or who said what, or who might get credit, or whatever it may be. And it’s really important to create the conditions in a lab or in a team or in a collaboration where multiple opinions can thrive—When that’s appropriate. [You should create the conditions] where people can take different perspectives, whether they’re discussing the methods to be employed, the instruments to be used, the analysis of data, [or] the interpretation of results. You want all of those ideas floating around and you want those conflicts resolved on the basis of the strength of the data-supported arguments that can be marshaled for them. So that’s good conflict, and, I think, that in a successful scientific collaboration or scientific team, part of the excitement for people is the idea that they can disagree like that without it becoming personal—without it falling off into being a personal dispute—where winning isn’t really what matters. And those are real privileged moments when you have that, and again it’s like [interpersonal] relationships. Having a friend with whom you can have a really intense discussion about something that matters to both of you is a very special kind of thing.
There are some challenges in inter-disciplinary teams that might be different, but also the very fact that they’re interdisciplinary creates the opportunity for multiple perspectives. So if you can get the people involved in the team from the different disciplines to see what an opportunity is. ([e.g.,] ‘How will someone who’s coming from this field see the results that are coming out of the work that I produced in our collaboration? What will it mean to them?’) It doesn’t hurt you [at all] to be curious about what you’ve done [and what that] means to someone else because it’s certainly not likely to mean the same to them that it means to you. So that’s where the potential is."
It can be helpful for teams to seek out an objective third party to help facilitate conflict resolution.
"In almost any group there’s someone to whom you can go and talk about problems. Getting another perspective on an issue [is important] if you have someone who you have confidence will be honest with you, won’t automatically take your side, and is willing [to] be critical if you deserve it but will not automatically side with the other people. [This should be] someone who you trust in that way. At least having the opportunity to talk about [group problems] with someone within the team if possible, or outside the team, [is ideal]. [In] most organizations there’s someone around to whom you can go for some kind of guidance. And there are interesting guidelines that people can find for how to engage in difficult conversations—including a couple of books with something like that in the title. And one can coach oneself about how to handle a difficult situation. One thing that a lot of people don’t think to do when they’re unhappy in the situation is to prepare before they go into the conversation in which they’re going to try to talk about it. It makes sense to sort of think strategically, [to ask yourself] ‘What am I really trying to accomplish in this conversation?’ [Ask yourself] how can [you] do it in a way that will increase the chances that the person [you] want to talk to might actually hear what [you’re] saying and not become defensive, and sort of practice before going in."
Mid-project evaluations are a different creature than end-of-project evaluations.
It would be premature to evaluate only citation impact, awarded grants and successfully accepted papers and presentations. Mid-project evaluations are typically informal and internal in contrast to end-of-project evaluations that may be required by the funding agency.
You should also look at indicators of how well a team navigates the collaborative process. If a team is submitting joint work in presentations, publications and grant applications this could indicate the team is interacting and producing results. Similarly, cross-attendance of seminars among the three studies or shared mentorship of trainees can indicate that team members are beginning to cross-talk among the projects.
That cross-pollination process can facilitate the emergence of a shared language and conceptualization, and, ultimately, transdisciplinary science. A lack of joint work could indicate that the team has never met, that team members remain siloed within their projects, or that authorship problems have arisen and remain unresolved.
The team’s use of collaboratory tools can suggest connectivity, especially if a team has remote members. Video conferencing tools such as Skype, Adobe Connect, and Open Meeting help the team communicate effectively, even from a distance.
Evaluating a team’s motivation and ability to plan for future funding is a key indicator of team science success. This suggests that the initial funding investment was sound and helped the team obtain the resources to continue a promising line of research.
However, keep in mind that the precursor condition for successful funding applications is usually that a team has invested time and energy in communicating ideas to one another.