In Fall 2022, Boise State University’s Center for Research and Creative Activity piloted an Interdisciplinary Research Accelerator (IRA) program. The IRA program formed interdisciplinary faculty teams around thematic topics. Teams received specialized training on research leadership, strategic visioning, and team science. Findings from the first year of the pilot program (NORDP, 2024) revealed that IRA teams experienced common difficulties in their development including challenges juggling the administrative burden of running the team, roadblocks in the development of team scope and vision, bandwidth issues, and challenges employing team science strategies effectively. Two of the IRA teams decided to hire a part-time research project manager midway through the pilot. These teams reported that the challenges and barriers were reduced with the addition of a skilled research project manager. In the second year of the pilot, IRA administrators chose to include a research project manager from Boise State’s Project Management Initiative on each team to ameliorate some of the barriers faced by teams in year one.

The team of research project managers already had a solid foundation in research project management entering year two of the pilot and IRA administrators saw an opportunity to up-skill the project managers to become team science practitioners poised to lead interdisciplinary research teams. The Team Science Learning Lab (TSLL) was born out of this opportunity. Michelle Grek, Project Management Initiative Program Manager, and Anna Drennen, Director of Education, Training, and Programmatic Sustainability created the TSLL to provide project managers a hands-on learning environment where they could increase their fluency in team science literature and practice, reflect on interdisciplinary team development, and collaborate as problem solvers to build their repertoire of effective team science strategies as project leads.

Our presentation will review the enabling conditions that led to the creation of the Team Science Learning Lab, including the contextual factors at Boise State as a growing R2 institution and the investments made to advance research and creative activity specifically in the area of interdisciplinary team development. We will review findings from the first cohort of the IRA program and detail the subsequent creation of the TSLL. We will share the process and format of the TSLL with details about the vision development, training plan, initial findings from the first year of practice, and plans for the future.