Whitney Sweeney, PhD, is a Scientist for the ICTR Team Science Core. She holds a PhD in Cognitive and Biological Psychology from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Before joining ICTR, Whitney served on the team that founded the American Family Insurance Data Science Institute. As Assistant Director, she established policy, processes, and teams as well as managed operations for the new center. Prior to that she supported faculty research and graduate education in the Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics.

In her role as Scientist, Dr. Sweeney’s work is focused on building infrastructure to support interdisciplinary teams. Leveraging over 20 years of experience in higher education, she designs, implements, and evaluates educational workshops and interventions to empower teams to skillfully collaborate. Her work in the development of the Translational Team Training Program was recently published in the Journal of Clinical and Translational Science. Interested in how unique team roles and identities impact both individual and team success, she is currently leading a project exploring the crucial role that project managers play in the success of translational teams. Other work of interest includes research related to the role of gender and health equity identities in translational teams.