The US National Science Foundation (NSF) Accelerating Research through International Network-to-Network Collaborations (AccelNet) Program recognizes the “intellectual potential” of large-scale, international, collaborative research networks in advancing the frontiers of science and training the next generation of U.S. researchers (NSF 2018). Understood as “established, coordinated, distributed group[s] of scientific researchers who cooperate within or across fields to collect and share resources, knowledge, and expertise” (NSF 2020), these networks of networks (NoN) can enable internationally distributed scientific researchers to collectively identify gaps in knowledge and areas for future research. This panel will present case study perspectives on NoNs followed by data collected through interviews and surveys of AccelNet project investigators, concluding with a discussion of how team science processes can support such large scale efforts.

The X-lites case study will focus on a NoN promoting research collaboration around the science and technology of extreme light sources (laser technologies that enable ultrashort time pulses, ultra-high electric fields, or ultra-high spatial resolution). This NoN is a two-layer network, with one layer being facilities that develop, operate, and maintain these specialized systems and the second layer being the researchers who use the facilities for their research. X-lites has used an AccelNet development grant to explore how to strengthen the connections across this multilayer network to advance scientific discoveries.

The Deep Ocean Observing Strategy (DOOS) is a community-driven, international initiative strategically aligning the deep ocean observing community toward collective solution-based science. It is a project of the Global Ocean Observing System (led by IOC-UNESCO) and endorsed by the United Nations Ocean Decade. But within this broadly distributed global context how does one truly create an aligned community of networks of networks? The DOOS case study will focus on the importance of aligning individual efforts toward shared aims, ensuring that value is added to participants, and leveraging existing efforts and resources.

MultiNet is an international mobility program that fosters advances in the field of multilayer network science. This field, which has been growing fast over the past decade, deals with network systems made of different layers, which typically represent different types of interactions between the same set of nodes. MultiNet has built the NoN via semester-long exchanges of junior research personnel, both graduate students and postdocs, from US-based institutions to the rest of the world, and vice versa. Many exchanges have involved labs that never interacted before, achieving the goal of enlarging the existing NoN on multilayer network science and forming a more cohesive community.

The goal of the INFRAMES (International Network for Researching, Advancing, and Assessing Materials for Environmental Sustainability) network of networks is to improve the sustainability of materials that interact with our natural environments at global scale. Our team applies methods from Integration and Implementation Sciences (I2S) and the Science of Team Science to enable convergent research by orienting our focus around named boundary objects that anchor our shared inquiry. Our NoN brings together diverse researchers and other interested parties to harness knowledge developments of the past 20 years in the nanomaterial environment, health and safety community globally, and transform and apply these approaches to priority processes involving the interaction of advanced and nanoscale materials with complex natural environments.

TJ Ronningen is a Research Scientist in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at The Ohio State University. TJ supports large, multi-institution projects as a project manager or systems lead. TJ’s collaborations are connected through applied optics and branch across traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Leslie Smith is an oceanographer and the Director of the Deep Ocean Observing Strategy. She works at the nexus point between research, communication, and program management through her company, Your Ocean Consulting, LLC.

Santo Fortunato is a Professor at Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering of Indiana University. His focus areas are network science, especially community detection in graphs, computational social science and science of science. 

Christine Ogilvie Hendren is Interim Director of Research and Innovation and Professor of Geological and Environmental Sciences at Appalachian State University. She also leads transdisciplinary and convergence research teams drawing on the discipline of I2S and SciTS to design and guide methods for boundary spanning knowledge production to address wicked socio environmental problems. 

Marisa Rinkus is an Associate Director of the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative Center at Michigan State University. She has led team science related research and client-based projects for the NSF and multiple universities in the US.

In alignment with the INSciTS vision to “create and facilitate a high-impact community that develops and disseminates an evidence-base to support team science,” this session will present the current evidence on debriefing and a debriefing culture to help improve and maximize team interactions, trust-building, team dynamics, and results. Presenting the most useful practices in organizational psychology, and the science supporting teams and groups, this session will help attendees consider the power and benefit of integrating a debriefing structure within their most important and mission-critical gatherings. In this session, the pros and cons to integrating a debrief culture will be presented and reviewed, as well as techniques for promoting psychological safety in the team environment. Additionally, attendees will evaluate which of their current meetings and teams could benefit from integration of a debrief to facilitate team assessment, evaluation, feedback, and improvement.

In alignment with the INSciTS mission to “addressing complex problems…(through) cross-disciplinary collaboration,” this session could benefit attendees with strategies on whether – and how to – integrate a debrief culture and a debrief structure into their most critical and important meetings. The session will offer participants to reflect on the amount of information sharing and level of psychological safety in various teams that they interact with. Attendees and members of the INSciTS community will benefit by gaining exposure to various simple structures that may be easily integrated into their current meeting practices to help improve communication, optimize team connection, engender trust, and promote positive change as the team dynamic improves over time.

During this session, attendees will be able to:

1. List the pros and cons to integrating a debrief culture into all aspects of their work within the organization.
2. Analyze their current team dynamics within their organization to assess the viability of integrating a debrief into their routine organizational practices.
3. Evaluate their current practices in integrating team debriefs into routine organizational gatherings and meetings.

The panel session will highlight three or more projects supported by the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Research Traineeship (NRT) and Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) programs where team science has been a particular focus of the programs. The audience will hear from a variety projects in different interdisciplinary STEM fields which focus on evidence based approaches and research methods (both qualitative and quantitative) around the development and testing of novel STEM graduate student training in interdisciplinary and convergent team science. The aim will be to disseminate and share best practices and demonstrated effective strategies for team-based approaches in graduate education from exemplar NRT Projects. It will highlight research-based approaches to evaluating the efficacy and effectiveness of team science interventions and the lessons learned during implementation of exemplar NRT projects. It will identify shared models, resources, and research methods for broader dissemination and adoption. The panel will provide INSciTS attendees a national and broad interdisciplinary view of what research methods and graduate education approaches are currently being deployed through the work of the NSF NRT/IGE programs.

Panel summary: The session will begin with an overview from Dr. Karen McNeal Project Director at the NSF. She will provide a brief description of the NSF about the IGE and NRT programs and the goals specifically related to team science (5mins). This panel will consistent of successful PIs and project evaluators of IGE/NRT Projects. Each selected NRT/IGE PI/evaluator panelist (3-4) will be provided 10 mins to focus on their team science elements in their program and discuss the intervention, the research approach, and lessons learned. The remaining session time will be open to Q&A and forum discussion.

Panelists Bio and expertise: The three panelists will represent both the National Science Foundation's Research Traineeship and Innovations in Graduate Education programs as former Principal or Co-Principal Investigator of supported programs. Dr. Ogle, Professor at Northern Arizona University and Dr. Katharyn Duffy, Director of Science Operations at Vibrant Planet, lead the "NRT-HDR: A team-based training paradigm integrating informatics and ecology" project which focused on developing a team-based graduate training program in ecological and environmental informatics, with a focus on team-based research combined with the development of strong expert and public communication skills and modern collaborative skills broadly applicable beyond academia. Dr. Hartley, Professor and Director of the Virginia Sea Grant Program, was PI of the "NRT-IGE: Team Science Training for Coastal Ocean & Estuarine STEM Graduate Students" which enabled students to practice team science research and use reflective practices to improve their competencies in teamwork with coastal community partners in climate-resilience topics.

The quality of the members that comprise an organisation is among one of the most important factors that can determine the output and survival of the organisation. To improve the quality of existing members, especially if replacement is undesirable, leaders of organisations often use various forms of training, such as directly organising workshops, seminars, online training, or perhaps encourage employers to enrol in job-related 3rd-party training by including it in performance review or providing subsidy. However, research in education has shown that such formal, top-down, one-to-many, short-term transfer of skills is often not a very efficient way of training. An alternative or complementary approach is to foster horizontal transfer of skills between current members. This approach ensures that most skills being learned are job-related and can be applied immediately, allowing reinforcement learning through positive feedback, and the learner often takes a more active role. Indeed, mentorship, journal club, and shadowing can be seen as systems that attempt to harness the power of such peer learning. It is however unclear how training compares to peer learning. It is possible that their comparative effectiveness depends on the type of skills being learned. Using agent-based models and data from a technology company, we compared the improvement of professional and teamwork skills through training and peer learning. Here, a professional skill is defined as something that allows a worker to directly contribute to job output, such as problem solving skills, technical knowledge, work efficiency, etc. Teamwork skills on the other hand are skills that do not contribute directly to work, but instead allow members of a team to cooperate more efficiently so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, with members of better professional skills contributing more to the final output of the team. We hypothesise that professional skill can diffuse from more skilled employees to less skilled employees at a constant rate over time as they interact, while teamwork skills directly improve as employees interact with each other on a social network. The effect of this peer learning is compared to the effect of employee training organised by the company. In contrast, participation in training events on various topics is assumed to provide an increase in the corresponding skills at a constant rate. We first used an agent-based model to simulate the whole process and generate pseudo-data to test the robustness of our statistical model, ensuring that the parameter values can be recovered, and then used the real data to calculate the efficiency of each learning. We found that training is more efficient for improving professional skills while peer learning is more efficient for improving teamwork skills.

Policy development is the life-source of academic governance and provides an exciting opportunity to create healthy teams within organizations. Attendees will receive foundational information on various models necessary for effective teams through policy inception, development, implementation, and evaluation. These models will span useful principles, including quality improvement, knowledge management, agency, and accountability structures.

This session will provide attendees with foundational information on quality improvement, knowledge management, and accountability structures necessary to evaluate operational practices and policies that guide their work.

This session will apply these frameworks to how leaders, both formal and informal, can leverage their roles and positions to help their academic unit and/or organization to increase leadership capacity and engender empowerment (Bishop, et al., 2008; Hedberg, 1981; Senge, 1990). Through agency and empowerment using the locus of control model, attendees will also experience a connection of the foundational information and frameworks to mentorship and building future leaders (Rotter, 1966). The critical opportunity for staff and faculty to voice their perspectives through the governance structures and processes will be discussed through the ways leaders and experienced mentors can encourage staff and faculty to voice their opinions and actively contribute to the organization, as well as develop their leadership skills for the future viability of their colleges/schools, and beyond (Bishop, et al., 2008; Hedberg, 1981; Senge, 1990).

This session will provide attendees with foundational information on quality improvement, knowledge management, and accountability structures necessary to evaluate operational practices and policies that guide their work. Frameworks in quality improvement will focus on plan-do-check-act (PDCA) and plan-do-study-act (PDSA) models used across various industries (Hedberg, 1981; Jones, 2013; Lussier & Achua, 2022). Knowledge management will be approached from a lens of organizational health, well-being and empowerment for faculty and staff, as well as creating a sustainable future for the organization (Hedberg, 1981; Jones, 2013; Lussier & Achua, 2022). Agency and approaching challenges with a healthy locus of control mindset can be very useful and empowering to all staff and faculty across academic units and disciplines (Rotter, 1966). Accountability models will review strategies to ensure candor and kindness when ensuring follow-up and follow through by ensuring responsibility, accountability, consultation, and informing others (RACI), Gantt charts, and other methods (Hedberg, 1981; Jones, 2013; Lussier & Achua, 2022).

Learning Objectives: By the end of this session, attendees will:

1. Incorporate policy development into team-centered organizational culture and climate associated with academic governance.
2. Develop team-centered policy creation to highlight opportunities for organizational health and well-being.
3. Identify team-centered, actionable next steps to form a framework for innovative approaches to policy development leveraging organizational health and well-being at their home institutions.