Presentation 1 
7 - Bridge2AI Goals, Roles, and Watering holes: A playbook for the leading edge of team science
Presented by: Tursynay Issabekova, University of Colorado
Authored by: Julie Bletz, Sage Bionetworks
James A. Eddy, University of Colorado
Kaitlin Flynn, University of Colorado
Sarah Gehrke, University of Colorado
Melissa Haendel, University of Colorado
Tursynay Issabekova, University of Colorado
Sruthi Magesh, University of Colorado
Julie A. McMurry, University of Colorado
Monica Munoz-Torres, University of Colorado
Anh Nguyen, University of Colorado
Shawn O’Neil, University of Colorado
Anne Thessen, University of Colorado
Anita Walden, University of Colorado

The most pressing biomedical challenges of our time require collaboration across disciplinary and institutional boundaries. Over the last two decades it has become clearer how to more successfully approach this; however, there are often few resources and infrastructure available to apply known team science best practices to data-intensive research. Further, methods for evaluating collaboration and the multivariate effects of individual and team characteristics on collaboration efficacy are active areas of research. In our experience on dozens of such projects (and based on years of team science research literature), the most successful programs have clear governance, a shared understanding about goals, and incentives aligned to those goals. Additionally, this healthy triad (Goals, Roles and Incentives) is supported by sound operational infrastructure. We share our experiences and resources in creating and supporting successful transdisciplinary collaborations, from strategies to building healthy collaborative communities to technological support for knowledge exchange and resource sharing. Our playbook includes collaborative agreements to foster sound governance, training and guidance around team science, and evaluation approaches to team health; together these will support the vital work of transdisciplinary science.

Presentation 2
10 - CFHealthHub Learning Health System: A national multi-disciplinary community of practice supporting people with cystic fibrosis to live as normal a life as possible 
Presented by: Lana Lai
Authored by: Lana Lai

Cystic fibrosis (CF) is a life-limiting inherited condition, characterised by a build-up of thick mucus causing progressive damage to multiple organ systems. Median life expectancy for people with CF in the UK is 53 years. The commonest cause of death is progressive deterioration in lung function due to chronic infection and inflammation. Daily inhaled therapy can control lung infection and slow lung function decline, but real-world adherence to treatment regimens is around 30-40%. CFHealthHub was conceived by the multi-disciplinary team in an adult UK CF Centre with the clear aim of enabling people with CF to live as normal a life as possible. A collaborative exercise involving people with CF and multi-disciplinary clinicians identified supporting adherence to inhaled therapy as a way of meeting this aim. 

A theory-based multi-component behaviour change intervention including habit formation as means of supporting adherence was developed with experienced psychologists at a local university. A bespoke digital platform, co-designed by people with CF and clinicians was developed by collaborators in a university-based digital health software team. This platform presents real-time, objective adherence data, allowing people with CF and their clinicians to see how well the habit formation intervention is going.

The intervention and digital platform underwent a mixed-methods process evaluation in two centres as a pilot study, before demonstrating sustained improvements in adherence in a 19-centre, 607-participant randomised controlled trial. CFHealthHub is now being implemented into routine care across 14 of the 23 adult CF centres in England. CFHealthHub provides a large national platform for research into the effects of co-adherence to inhaled therapy for people with who are taking a novel oral medicine (elexacaftor/texacaftor/ivacaftor), which has revolutionised CF care since it became available in 2020. Adherence data from CFHealthHub are also used to optimise medicines supply by reducing wastage/stockpiling, with the potential to deliver significant cost-savings to CF centres.

Central to the success of CFHealthHub is the multi-disciplinary community of practice representing each centre, who meet at a fixed time weekly to share learning, experience, and ideas whilst co-ordinating formal activities in research and quality improvement. The community includes physicians, nurses, physiotherapists, dieticians, pharmacists, psychologists and social workers. The community are provided with training and support to undertake national and local improvement work and are given a space to learn and share. All programme work is underpinned by elements from established theory, such as the COM-B (Capability, Opportunity, Motivation - Behaviour) model for behaviour change, the Dartmouth Microsystems approach to quality improvement and the learning health system approach to combining science, informatics, data and culture to deliver continuous improvement. CFHealthHub, which was recently recognised as the only condition-specific full learning health system in the UK by the Health Foundation, is a rich case study demonstrating how a multi-disciplinary team, united by a clear shared aim can optimise care and deliver high-quality research and improvement work.

Presentation 3
18 - Complexity Leadership in Action: A Team Science Case Study
Presented by: Gemma Jiang, Colorado State University
Authored by: Diane Boghrat, Imageomics Institute
Jennifer Cross, Colorado State University
Jenny Grabmeier, The Ohio State University
Gemma Jiang, Colorado State University

We describe a successful team science case study in which complexity leadership theory is applied to redesigning a cross-disciplinary science institute’s weekly research coordination meeting. 
CLT outlines three types of leadership: entrepreneurial, operational and enabling. Entrepreneurial leadership is responsible for experimentation, innovation and novelty; operational leadership is responsible for exploitation, productivity and results; enabling leadership operates in the interface between operational and entrepreneurial leadership and enables the adaptive process until a new adaptive order is established. The three types of leadership work together to pivot a system away from an order response and towards an adaptive response that capitalizes on pressure to change.

The narrative arc of this paper follows the four stages of the adaptive process in complex adaptive systems: disequilibrium, amplification, emergence, and new order.

1. Disequilibrium: pressures and tension
The adaptive process begins with disequilibrium when a system feels the pressure to change. These pressures are often referred to as adaptive challenges that require new ways of thinking and behaving. During the summer of the first year of this institute’s funding, a new program director introduced disequilibrium to the weekly research coordination meetings. 
 
2. Amplification: entrepreneurial and operational systems
In response to the adaptive challenges, entrepreneurial leadership begins an ideation process that is characterized by adaptive tension and task related conflicts. Innovative team members seek to identify and experiment with different pathways. Their ideas conflict, combine, and recombine until potential adaptive responses are identified. The program director and team scientist, the two main entrepreneurial leaders of the change initiative, organized a town hall to gather feedback and redesigned the meeting series. But they were met with resistance from the operational leaders (i.e. a few senior principal investigators).

3. Emergence: enabling leadership and adaptive space
Enabling leadership creates the conditions for an adaptive solution to be integrated in the operational system. In this stage, enabling and entrepreneurial leaders work together to morph the ideas until they can be more broadly applied and adopted by the operational system. The team scientist, now primarily an enabling leader, continued to engage with the junior scientists as entrepreneurial leaders to refine the ideas, and gain support. They co-created an adaptive solution. 

4. Stabilizing feedback: new order
Stabilizing feedback is the last stage in the adaptive process. The entrepreneurial and/or enabling leaders link up with operational leaders and get the adaptive solution incorporated in the operational system. The system operates in the form of a new adaptive order with new processes, procedures or products. The team scientist presented the adaptive solution to the full institute leadership team and gained approval. The new design has gone through five monthly cycles, with 20 weekly research coordination meetings in total. 

Building on insights from this novel application of complexity leadership theory, we share important implications for team science practice pertaining to generating momentum for change, re-examining power dynamics, defining critical roles, building multiple pathways towards team capacity development, and holding adaptive spaces. We also explore promising areas for further exploration.

Presentation 4
33 - Interdisciplinary Dialogue Fosters Team Science Skills in Undergraduate Researchers
Presented by: Valerie Imbruce, Washington College
Authored by: Jaime Garcia Vila, Michigan State University
Jessica Hua, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Valerie Imbruce, Washington College
Michael O’Rourke, Michigan State University
Marisa Rinkus, Michigan State University
Kyra Ricci, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Team science that unites specialists of different, discipline-based knowledge domains is critical for solving complex societal problems. Professionals who can merge, contrast, and identify complementary or divergent insights, and who can empathize, be self-reflexive, and seek to understand others’ perspectives, are needed to facilitate successful team approaches. In higher education, interdisciplinary teaching and learning can foster these team skills at the undergraduate level, but is challenged by the dominant practice of individual assessment to establish GPAs and the separation of disciplinary training through traditional majors and minors. We present a novel and easy to implement workshop to enable students to identify complementary or divergent approaches and insights among academic specializations—a skill built from raising interdisciplinary consciousness. We describe a workshop designed to enhance undergraduates’ interdisciplinary consciousness that can be easily deployed within courses or co-curricular programs to foster team science skills. We focused on implementing the workshop with research-intensive students in a summer program who are not being assessed for academic credit. Our central question is: How do we facilitate interdisciplinary consciousness and assess its impact on our students? We designed a set of prompts for undergraduate researchers to discuss key aspects of the research process, inclusive of novel prompts on how students’ identities influence their positionality in research settings and their choice of research topics. We propose that this dialogue-based intervention can be easily replicated to the benefit of summer research programs as well as other academic programs that require the interaction and integration of multiple discipline-based norms. We found that our dialogue intervention opens students' perspectives on the nature of research, who research is for, epistemological differences among researchers, and the importance of practicing the research process as a unique educational experience. Students found these new perspectives through self-description, assimilation, differentiation, and asking for classification or elaboration of each others’ ideas. Our findings indicate that such dialogue demonstrates important gains for students navigating an increasingly competitive and demanding professional world that requires team approaches to problem solving. To realize how the practice of a research process is valuable not only across disciplines but as a professional skill is powerful. And that undergraduates could become attuned to hierarchies of disciplinary power within higher education could bring us one step closer to embracing pluralities of knowing and becoming effective team players. Even one small dialogue, during one short summer program, could catalyze lasting change in participants who likely have not had the opportunity to engage in such reflexive work with a diverse group of budding experts and may not have such an opportunity again.