Research Infrastructure: RCN: A Comprehensive Toolkit for Interdisciplinary Team Science, & its Context-Dependent Application

Interdisciplinary Team Science is needed to address numerous challenges facing humanity, from pandemics, to the transformation of the energy sector, to the largest challenge our species has ever faced, that of climate change. Since 2020, the National Science Foundation has invested in a collection of large-team Biology Integration Institutes to advance innovation in priority areas across the biological sciences, with 13 currently funded Institutes.

This collection of teams presents a powerful opportunity for advancement, in addition to that from their science: the collection and organization of the Interdisciplinary Team Science tools they have developed or applied, and an evaluation for the context-dependency of their application - i.e. how host organization (e.g. university size, Carnegie Classification System, populations served) and team characteristics (e.g. size, governance structures, career stage, demography) influence teams’ prioritized needs for different kinds of tools. In this Research Coordination Network, the Biology Integration Institutes will work together to pool resources, evaluate the context-dependency of use, and disseminate the collected Toolkit for Interdisciplinary Team Science.

This will promote scientific progress across a range of areas where large-team integration is essential.

Technical Description: This Research Coordination Network (RCN) unites the Biology Integration Institute (BII) program members to share knowledge, tools and perspectives around interdisciplinary teaming, in a single organized Toolkit, spanning elements from Governance Plans to Social Media Best Practices. It also evaluates how the value to teams of these tools varies based on organizational and team context, across a range of axes (e.g. type of university).

Lastly, it disseminates the Toolkit and results of the context-dependency analysis, through a broad network of scientific teams and communities. The Merit of the proposed RCN project is in leveraging the opportunity of the NSF BII Program to harvest the Interdisciplinary Team resources that hundreds of scientists across these organizations have developed or assembled, and ‘field tested’.

By then evaluating the relative usefulness and importance of tools across teams, and expanding the evaluation to other large teams that the RCN’s Team Scientists have worked with, the RCN will provide qualitative insights into context-dependency of tool usage, which is a key knowledge gap among team science practitioners. The impacts of the proposed work are to advance teaming across a range of communities and democratize the knowledge of teaming resources, which can present a significant impediment to broadened participation in proposing and leading large science teams.

A range of early-career researchers will also be directly involved in implementation of this RCN, and associated training.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.