Theories and practices of team science offer an important corrective to traditional group science endeavors that often operate in a top-down, hierarchical manner. Drawing together diverse bodies of knowledge, the Science of Team Science (SciTS) has offered tools and mechanisms to teams looking for alternative ways of functioning. I gained firsthand experience with such approaches as a Team Scientist at Colorado State University (CSU) from 2021-2023. Additionally, my research explores how immigrants, refugees, and others in the United States find and create spaces for democratic engagement in American society. This work is grounded in theories and practices of participatory democracy. Reflecting on my practice as a team scientist and insights I have gained through my research on participatory democracy, I see potential to synthesize the two sets of theories and practices together in productive ways. In this paper, I argue that sustained engagement with participatory democracy, particularly as it is practiced in democratically organized cooperatives, can enrich the practice of team science. There are conceptual insights team science can gain from democracy and practical tools and approaches to facilitate meaningful interactions within and across teams. Connections between team science and democracy appear in some of the literature; however, there is significant room to enhance those connections. I elaborate how this engagement might look across several areas: group norms, power, leadership, structures, and mechanisms. First, developing and inculcating group norms is an area where there is a strong overlap between team science and democracy. Both are predicated on equality and equity and seek to build reciprocity and dialogue among members. Flattening hierarchy through democracy has intrinsic value and in practice can lead to better outcomes. Second, democratic approaches provide additional orientations toward power. Mediating power imbalances to facilitate less hierarchical decision making is a central goal of democracy. Democratic approaches offer insights into how to identify power dynamics as well as tools to implement formal structures to mitigate them. Such structures can mediate autocratic tendencies of individuals while simultaneously distributing power to the wider group for collective decision making. Democracy recognizes individual agency, collective action, and limiting and enabling structures. Third, participatory democracy of this type also provides an alternative way of thinking about leadership. Pace approaches emphasizing the individual characteristics of those in (in)formal leadership roles, democratic approaches assume an equal standing and capacity for all members to make decisions. For democratic groups, leaders are accountable to the members who select them, exercise authority only contextually, and, importantly, are recallable when there is a need for change. Fourth, participatory democracy as practiced in cooperatives throughout the world offers many structures and mechanisms for ensuring success. We might for example think of a scientific team as a democratic polity bound by a constitution composed of components such as mission statements, ethical ground rules, authorship guidelines, etc. Decisions in such groups can be made through consensus, one person, one vote or other mechanisms such as five-finger voting. Moreover, many democratic organizations make use of strategies such as rotating tasks and cross training to ensure that all members have deep knowledge of the work throughout the organization and have opportunities to grow their skills. Finally, considering this, this paper is an invitation to team science practitioners and science teams to consider how integrating formalized democratic processes and structures might benefit them. Particularly as we consider flatter, more egalitarian teams, participatory democracy can be a critical tool in realizing such aims.