Nature provides us with time-tested blueprints to inspire unique thinking and innovative designs. Bioinspired design (BID) is the process of integrating fundamental biological and engineering approaches to solve technological problems. Successful BID depends on the collaboration of experts across these fields. Team science research suggests that collaborators engaging in transdisciplinary research can face multiple challenges, including complex motivations across researchers from different disciplines, misperceptions of benefits between researchers in different fields, and institutionalized barriers that disincentivize interdisciplinary work. Our prior work (Barley et al., 2022) established that BID researchers perceived these challenges to building truly transdisciplinary research teams, suggesting that much of the work being published in this space may be being produced from within disciplinary silos. Yet, bibliometric scholarship (e.g., Shi & Evans, 2023) suggests that those teams who successfully include the participation of biologists and engineers may be disproportionately able to innovate in ways that unidisciplinary teams cannot. In this work, we perform a structured review alongside a co-authorship analysis to ask: How transdisciplinary is BID research? And how does the makeup of a co-authorship team influence the content of the products they produce? To determine if collaborative projects are truly transdisciplinary, we codified self-identified bioinspired design journal articles. For this poster, we present our results for one of those topics, “flight,” and focus on articles that use terminology related to BID and flight. Flight was chosen because bioinspiration has played a key role in shaping aerial systems research for decades. For this investigation, we used the two largest abstract and indexing databases: Web Of Science Core Collection and Scopus. We codified parameters such as team size, team member affiliation, journal type, funding sources, and impact of the research. Our work extends prior bibliometric research (e.g., Ng et al., 2021) on BID by (1) providing paper-level analyses of co-authorship structures and (2) relating these structures with semantic analyses of transdisciplinary integration. We hypothesize that (1) published BID research is predominantly produced by engineering co-authorship teams, and (2) because of that, most BID products tend to emphasize applications to building devices or systems rather than advancing biological research/theory. However, (3) those papers that are co-authored by diverse co-authorship teams (i.e., evenly split between biologists and engineers) will exhibit an increased propensity for cross-disciplinary synthesis and applications of BID knowledge. Therefore, there is a need for formal mechanisms that enhance the transdisciplinarity of BID via structural resources to facilitate dialog and to acknowledge the systemic barriers to collaboration (Barley et al., 2022). The bibliometric methods we develop herein can serve as a model for application for the study of other cross-disciplinary research topics.

Team science skills are necessary for effective inter- and intra-professional research team performance. Studies have shown that there is insufficient training in team science.[1,2,7,8] We developed TeamMAPPS (Team Methods to Advance Processes and Performance in Science), a team science curriculum based in evidence from the Science of Team Science (SciTS) and the science of teams.[1] Similar to the COALESCE program,[7] TeamMAPPS is delivered in a series of online education modules with optional guided facilitation that can take many forms. TeamMAPPS is a behavioral based training program, emphasizing nine specific behavioral skills organized around three competencies (Psychological Safety, Awareness and Exchange, and Adaptation and Correction). The intended audience of adult scientists made it vital to ensure that this program was designed specifically to meet the needs of adult learners using the evidence-based best practices of andragogy, the study of adult education. Malcolm Knowles (1980) defined a framework for andragogy, which recognizes that adult learners have specific drivers and motivations for learning that require adaptation of traditional training methods and learning environments, which are designed for youth. The online modules and implementation materials used to deliver TeamMAPPS therefore integrate key tenets of Knowles’ framework into their core design. This poster describes how andragogical principles were integrated with evidence-based team science practices to ensure that TeamMAPPS effectively delivered content in a manner acceptable to adult learners.

Many educational programs are based on traditional assumptions that the student is dependent upon the teacher, whether the teacher is a physical person or merely conceptual (e.g., AI or a directed software application), to determine “what is to be learned, when it is to be learned, how it is to be learned, and if it has been learned.”[4] The study of andragogy illuminates the adult learner’s need for self-directed learning, rather than the more traditional, teacher-led viewpoint. Thus, adult learning theory is particularly germane to scientific trainees and experience researchers alike[10].

Andragogical studies show six key principles that motivate adult learners: adult learners need to know why what they are learning is meaningful to them and how they can apply it; they come to the learning program with a variety of professional backgrounds and experience; they tend towards independent, self-directed learning driven by the need for autonomy; the learning experiences need to be flexible and readily available to them when they have time; the learning must be practical and focus on solutions to relevant, real-world problems; and the learning must provide some sort of intrinsic motivation to aid in self-actualization.[4,9,5,3]

The TeamMAPPS program designed the learning materials, organization, activities, and user interface with these principles in mind to maximize learning efficacy[6]. A dissemination and implementation study is being conducted to discover qualitative reactions from TeamMAPPS implementers and participants. An evaluation study of learning outcomes involving pre-post quizzes and in-module questions is also being conducted. Findings from these studies will shed light on the effectiveness of TeamMAPPS, including the impact of the andragogical theory incorporated into the online modules and delivery plans.

International Virtual Research Organizations (IVRO) for collaborative research provide infrastructure support for a complex system of organizing, planning, and decision making for scientific research. This study investigates similarities and differences among structural components of three different types of consortiums of large scientific collaborations: Joint Lab for Extreme Scale Computing (JLESC), Big Data and Extreme Scale Computing 2 (BDEC2), and Chinese American German E-Science and Cyberinfrastructure initiative (CHANGES). The overarching objective of these IVROs, which span multiple institutions, cultures, and scientific and engineering specialties, is to generate complex projects. However, these initiatives are different in nature, scope, and specific objective. JLESC represents a case of dynamic collaboration and scientific networking among investigators, projects, and supporting organizations that has generated a significant number of valuable products and team science projects without a high level of structure or specified processes. BDEC 2 represents a strategic coalition for international cooperation in the design and development of new generation software infrastructures for extreme scale science. CHANGES represents a collaboration among three partners: The National Center for Supercomputing Applications from the USA, the Jülich Supercomputing Centre from Germany, and the Computer Network Information Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences from China; and was developed to enhance collaboration between these centers through a series of workshops. There are some notable similarities among them. All these organizations are multinational, multidisciplinary, and include diverse participants including scientists, technologists, postdocs, graduate students, and management personnel. The three IVROs differ in terms of membership composition, management and coordination, funding structure, communication, participation levels, and activities and outputs. Based on the objective of an IVRO, membership could be relatively open or closed. BDEC2 is an example of a relatively open community, where JLESC and CHANGES are relatively closed. Where open community infrastructures such as BDEC2 are developed around broad and inclusive principles, JLESC and CHANGES were created with a very structured memorandum of understanding (MoU). JLESC has multiple management groups and multiple workgroups. Coordination is centralized and responsibilities are clearly documented. BDEC2 on the other hand is an example of simple management and coordination with central leadership and peripheral workgroups. All IVROs under investigation were developed based on a shared funding model. All IVROs have online presence. Interestingly, our observation concludes that IVROs, although initially idealized as cyberinfrastructures, utilize co-located rather than a virtual model of communication and participation. Participation in activities and workgroups varies across IVROs, ranging from limited selected participants (CHANGES) to extended participation (JLESC) to open opportunities of participation (BDEC2). This analysis provides an insight into team science and organizational evolution processes within IVROs.

Scientific and technological innovation introduces moral uncertainty. In response, stakeholders develop moral mandates – a type of external mandate in which expectations are imposed on organizations to get them to align with a moral cause (Choi, Augustine, and King, 2023), such as the call for organizations to improve diversity. Yet, moral mandates are often ambiguous (Choi, Augustine, and King, 2023). When organizations attempt to comply with ambiguous external mandates, there can be jurisdictional ambiguity, in that the work needed to implement the mandate is unclear (Augustine, 2021), and jurisdictional conflict, in that it may be unclear which occupational group has authority to interpret (or ignore) the mandate (Abbott, 1988). These issues may be exacerbated for moral mandates, which challenge existing occupational ethics (Wilensky, 1964; Abbott, 1988).

Often, responsibility for implementing moral mandates falls to peripheral actors with relevant expertise, like diversity officers (e.g., Kalev, Dobbin, & Kelly, 2006). Implementing moral mandates is difficult. Peripheral experts may struggle to keep their jurisdiction aligned to a mandate, given internal organizational politics, but can partially realign their work via concealed jurisdictional expansion (Augustine, 2021). In other cases, implementing a moral mandate involves influencing others. Literature demonstrates that peripheral experts leverage opportunity windows early in relationships with core experts to elicit cooperation (DiBenigno, 2020). However, research has not explicated how peripheral experts address ongoing instances of jurisdictional drift of core experts, especially when core experts believe they are appropriately enacting a moral mandate. Opportunity windows observed in prior research may be closed, preventing the use of known tactics. Further, occupational groups see their practices and morals as intertwined (Anteby, 2010), suggesting attempts to change core expert practices may constitute both an uninformed disruption to their work and an affront to their morality. This paper develops theory about how peripheral experts get core experts to address jurisdictional drift to more successfully implement a moral mandate.

This paper uses data from an 18-month ethnography of a team science project focused on improving data availability for artificial intelligence. The project was tasked with collecting a racially representative dataset for AI-catalyzed research in healthcare. They were given an ambiguous moral mandate to “ethically source” data; peripheral experts – ethicists – and core experts – clinical researchers – developed differing views about complying with this mandate. Peripheral experts were able to partially realign core experts’ work to their interpretation of the mandate by enacting “didactic friction” – ethicists took an instructive tone to frame perceived divergence from the mandate as harmful to participants and challenge the ethical norms of clinical research. The subsequent conflict disrupted the project such that it created an opportunity for another phase, “collaborative negotiation.” Core experts, wishing to maintain project momentum, negotiated with peripheral experts about aligning data collection practices with the mandate. This analysis suggests that didactic friction modestly changed practices by reminding core experts of shared commitment to the mandate and forcing collaboration to de-escalate conflict. Yet, didactic friction degraded relationships; core experts felt unfairly accused of being unethical, while peripheral experts felt their expertise was disregarded.

The Science and Technologies for Phosphorus Sustainability (STEPS) Center is a convergence research center that brings together faculty, postdoctoral scholars, graduate and undergraduate students across multiple disciplines and academic institutions to work in transdisciplinary teams on research related to sustainable phosphorus use and management. Convergence research requires developing shared language, research questions and goals to co-create the knowledge needed to address complex societal challenges. Reflective, interdisciplinary exercises help our center develop these shared understandings across disciplines and increase our convergence capacity. Literature on interdisciplinary collaboration has emphasized the importance of creating such opportunities where concepts and artifacts of different fields can be discussed explicitly.

To address this need, we developed a retreat for a group of 40 researchers from across the STEPS community to integrate their unique perspectives to contribute to research brainstorming, developing unique projects and outcomes related to sustainable phosphorus management in South Florida. The two-day retreat began with a day of field excursions and informational presentations to provide context for the research challenges specific to the region. The second day participants were assigned to one of five groups with a designated facilitator to brainstorm a "big idea" chosen based on discussions the previous day. Using color-coded post-it notes to record concepts, project ideas, data needs, existing project contributions, related impact opportunities and stakeholders. Groups then rotated through the other "big ideas" to add their own contributions and identify connections between projects. From this work a knowledge map was generated that visualizes project connections based on shared data needs, impact opportunities, stakeholders, and methods.

Knowledge maps are generally developed as visual aids to identify knowledge flows and gaps within an establishment. Although the concept of knowledge mapping itself is not new, methods to develop knowledge maps are emerging that identify and illustrate the connections between disparate information including knowledge sources, flows and generation for complex systems and organizations. Here we demonstrate a knowledge mapping process to integrate the different perspectives across a diverse research team and provide examples of the visualization. The process and resulting visualizations allow the research team members to recognize existing or potential resources for their individual projects, where they can support developing knowledge with other project groups, and where knowledge gaps still need to be addressed to answer shared research questions.

The days of the lone scientists sitting in solitude solving equations and doing experiments are long over with >95% of science being teams of researchers working together towards scientific discoveries. In addition to learning the technical skills of their respective fields, scientists must learn strategies for better communication and team work to be successful in the competitive world of research. Using stories from fields of such astrometry, or infectious disease outbreak discovery, can highlight principles for creating community, integrity and loyalty, communication, and compassion in teams. Each principle important for successful teams can be applied to researchers in all fields of science to help increase the communication and trust between team members. Capturing and sharing both stories of successes and failures in research teams can help provide a dialog to researchers to talk about how to improve collaborations. Researchers around the world know when teams click, and everything goes better than planned on the path to scientific discoveries. Likewise, most can share stories of failed collaborations that had broken communication channels, no trust, and lacked progress towards the stated project goals. Through learning from successes and failures of past collaborations, we gain insights that help future collaborations succeed and have influence. This talk will highlight the 1993 hantavirus outbreak research team in New Mexico that for over 25 years completed transformational science.

In today’s rapidly evolving research landscape, the collaboration among scientists from diverse disciplines has become increasingly crucial for addressing complex societal challenges such as climate change, global sustainability on food, water, and land use driven by growing population, rising per capita incomes, to name a few. Science gateways address this need by providing user-friendly access to research infrastructure, data collections, lab instruments, and tools for science and engineering researchers, educators, and students. These gateways streamline collaboration, foster open science practices, and shield researchers from the intricacies of the underlying infrastructure. They allow for smooth data sharing, reproducibility, and transparency, advancing collaborative research and open science.

In the last 15 years, quite a few mature science gateway frameworks and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) have been developed to ease the development of instances of science gateways, and each of them has its own communities, strengths, and foci. The Gateways Central effort of SGX3 (the NSF Center of Excellence for Science Gateways) has over 600 entries reflecting the diversity of science gateways and their application areas. The connection to multiple computing infrastructures, including local, distributed, and volunteer systems, is supported by various mature frameworks and APIs. Many diverse communities use some of these. Hubzero, TAPIS, and Galaxy are examples of complete frameworks allowing a community manager and/or administrator to set up a science gateway. TAPIS offers RESTful web services for efficiently developing a science gateway with diverse services and support for various programming languages. RESTful services and parts of user interface implementations of widely used open-source science gateways such as CIPRES are re-used for further implementations. Hubzero and Galaxy provide graphical web interfaces for interacting with tools and sharing data. All aforementioned frameworks or services support local computing infrastructures, distributed computing infrastructures, data-driven research, and team collaboration capabilities.

SGX3 is committed to supporting interdisciplinary teams in their research endeavors. It offers a range of services, including expertise in designing and developing science gateways, usability and sustainability consulting, gap analysis, training opportunities, and an annual conference for networking and knowledge exchange. Through SGX3, interdisciplinary teams can leverage science gateways to achieve several key objectives: 

Streamlined collaboration: Science gateways provide user-friendly interfaces and essential tools, fostering effective communication and joint problem-solving among researchers from diverse backgrounds.  

Enhanced resource access: Resources are readily available through a single access point, eliminating the need for researchers to spend time locating and learning diverse tools specific to each discipline.

Innovation tailored to their needs: Existing frameworks provide a solid foundation upon which tailored solutions can be built. This not only accelerates scientific progress but also promotes a spirit of collaboration and knowledge sharing within the research community. 

By empowering researchers to transcend disciplinary boundaries, science gateways facilitate and accelerate research progress, effectively addressing complex scientific challenges, and achieving their research objectives more efficiently.

This presentation will provide insights into the intersection of open science and interdisciplinary team science, showcasing how science gateways serve as facilitators for collaboration, innovation, and inclusivity in research endeavors.

To be effective, both research teams and teams that support them need a compelling purpose and sound structure for achieving it (Hackman & Wageman 2015). Grant proposals and unit mission statements rarely provide enough clarity; often teams must do more before they can decide what their purpose means in observable terms and which specific tasks coordinated by which team norms will likely accomplish this shared purpose. Previous work has shown that team chartering workshops like collaboration planning (Rolland et al 2021) can help teams clarify their purpose and working norms (Begerowski et al 2021). However, it is not clear how to reliably balance the amount of structure, content, and freedom given to teams in these workshops (Rolland et al 2021). There is thus an important need to understand principles for designing such workshops so that they reliably catalyze shared purpose and sound team structure. In the absence of such principles, team chartering workshops will continue to be difficult to plan and execute.

We posit that design thinking principles can fill this need (LaPensée & Doshi 2020). At the Michigan Institute for Clinical & Health Research (MICHR), we have developed workshops that include design thinking activities known as “Research Jams.” Our Ideation and Visioning Jams reliably focus and accelerate team creativity, generating excitement for working together (LaPensée et al 2021). Now, we are developing a new “flavor of Jam” known as a Strategy Jam to help teams convert their big idea into an actionable purpose, principles, and projects.

The Strategy Jam is based on the Strategy Sprint, a type of workshop developed by the consulting firm AJ&Smart to help their clients craft specific, actionable strategies for achieving measurable business goals. Strategy Sprints themselves are a variation on the more widely known Design Sprint model (Knapp et al 2016). While a Design Sprint creates a prototype of a product or intervention, a Strategy Sprint aligns the group on their purpose, challenges, strengths and limitations, and an action-oriented strategy (complete with roadmap). The Strategy Sprint differs from other team chartering workshops by emphasizing wisdom of the crowd logic (“working together alone”); scaffolding sentence starters and notetaking; and providing multiple modes of participation at every point.

At MICHR, we are piloting several versions of the Strategy Sprint as Strategy Jams to help both new and existing programs focus on the challenges their team faces. Initial prototyping has yielded important feedback to inform future iterations of the Strategy Jam model. These iterative results allow us to explore which features of the Strategy Jams are influencing which outcomes. Ultimately, we are surfacing the utility of design thinking principles for shaping team chartering workshops so they reliably accelerate team research.

Reliance on electronic systems for communication and task coordination became a norm for the majority of task teams. Coordination allows a work team to manage dependencies among tasks and team members to integrate their contribution to achieve team goal. It involves a set of team practices including setting up deadlines, plans, schedules, and programs to manage and predict work flow. Coordination via communication includes formal and informal interaction, information exchange, feedback loops, and coordination among team members. In environments similar to software development, coordination via planning refers to programming, impersonal coordination, or administrative coordination. A communication and coordination plan turns co-ordination mechanisms into an explicit feature of the project structure. Teams that rely on electronic means of communication and coordination produce huge amount of electronically traceable data that are often ignored in traditional team science research. However, coordination in distributed work teams involves strategies to integrate actions, behaviors, knowledge, and information sharing to attain goals and increase team effectiveness. Traceable communication and coordination data, therefore, could capture multiple team processes in a way that is beyond traditional approaches. There are several common information spaces in software development teams that is uncommon in other work environments, but together they create an information sharing environment. These include ticketing systems, bug tracking systems, Wiki, and inside code annotations. This study attempted to unfold the process of task coordination and communication by software development team by looking into a novel information repository. This study explored US Virtual Astronomical Observatories (VAO) website to mine data related to Iris software development. We argue that this environment adds additional information to scholars to study organizational and team processes that is not available through traditional data collection methods. However, it can demonstrate a way not only to study other organizational teams but also provide ways to transform teams to be more effective by adopting these environments.

Workplace meetings, including of science teams, have changed from face-to-face to virtual due to COVID-19 mitigations and then back again. The effects of these modes on productivity, collaboration, and innovation have been debated in organizational psychology (Gibson et al., 2023), but less so the needs of workers with disabilities in different meeting modes. While team researchers have examined many kinds of demographic diversity, disability diversity is relatively understudied. Using the constrained Census definitions of disability, 3% of STEM workers report at least one disability (NCSES, 2023). That noted, HCI researchers have examined the effects of technology on workers with disabilities (e.g., Tang, 2021), including the barriers and opportunities of hybrid meetings on disabled workers (Alharbi et al., 2023).

The goal of this ongoing study is to better understand the challenges, opportunities, and effects on disabled workers of team meeting mode, be it face-to-face, virtual/remote, or hybrid. Hybrid meetings can involve workers as either the remote or in-person team members.

We conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 participants (so far): 67% identify as women, 20% as nonbinary, and 13% as men, with an average age of 35 (23-59). Given the breadth of conditions that can require accommodations, we used self-identification rather than the Census definitions. The participants identified as having a wide variety of disabilities including chronic illness, physical disabilities, cognitive impairment, and learning disabilities.

Participants were recruited via disability listservs and via U.S. organizations that listed disability affinity groups. The interviews consisted of three sections centering lived experiences with team meetings and requested recall of two critical incidents. Questions covered aspects of technology usage, benefits, drawbacks, and frustrations with team meeting modality, and characteristics of ideal meetings. We are conducting thematic analysis of the transcribed interviews and will conduct iterative and reliability coding.

Preliminary findings indicate that participants are most concerned about communication barriers, regardless of the meeting format. Poor audiovisual quality was the most common barrier to participation, negatively affecting participants with all types of disabilities. Participants with both physical and non-physical disabilities cited hybrid and virtual options as an accessible accommodation, even if their preference was for in-person meetings.

Commentary emerged on the issue of conflicting accommodations, such as the use of captioning that is necessary for one participant causing significant nausea in another. While some participants cited a need for visual connection with meeting attendees, others cited camera-off meetings as an accessibility option that allowed them to work through pain or discomfort when they otherwise would not have been able to attend meetings. Though this point was asserted as a benefit, it raises concerns about expectations of presenteeism instead of using sick time.

Participant feedback on ideal meeting features centered around facilitation, planning, and logistical considerations, regardless of meeting format. Agendas, post-meeting notes, and detailed information about the digital and physical accessibility accommodations of an upcoming meeting were the main participant requests. We will continue data collection and analysis through 2024.