Neuroscientists investigating the neural bases of cognition in health and disease increasingly face choices about how to structure their programs of research. On the one hand, they can pursue independent investigator-led disciplinary specific research projects and seek funding through traditional granting mechanisms. On the other, they can experiment with interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborations of varying scale and scope, applying for funding for multi-year milestone driven research projects. Although team-based initiatives have become a prominent feature of the neuroscientific research landscape in recent years, relatively little is known about how scientists evaluate whether participation in them is worth pursuing. In this talk, I present findings from semi-structured interviews with 10 neuroscientists participating in the Translational Research Initiative to De-Risk NeuroTherapeutics (TRIDENT) that bear on this question.

TRIDENT is a six-year CAD$24 million interdisciplinary research initiative funded through the New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF) Transformation Program (https://sshrc-crsh.canada.ca/funding-financement/nfrf-fnfr/transformation/transformation-eng.aspx). TRIDENT brings together researchers from multiple institutions and disciplinary backgrounds including cellular and molecular neurobiology, pathobiology of neurodegenerative disease, neurochemistry, functional and resting state neuroimaging, computational neuroimaging, rodent behavioral neuroscience, non-human primate neurophysiology, and sex and hormone influences on brain health and behavior. TRIDENT’s aim is to develop an open-science preclinical platform for evaluating potential therapeutics for neurodegenerative diseases. More specifically, by coordinating experimental work across multiple model systems (e.g., neuro-organoids, mice, and marmosets), methodological approaches (e.g., light sheet microscopy, neuroimaging, behavioral assessment techniques), and levels of analysis (e.g., biochemistry, neurophysiology, computational neuroscience), the initiative seeks to improve the reliability of preclinical evidence used to determine whether candidate drugs for neurodegenerative diseases (e.g., Parkinson’s disease) should advance to human clinical trials. As such, TRIDENT provides a unique opportunity to examine how scientists evaluate whether participation in large-scale interdisciplinary translational neuroscience initiatives are worth pursuing.

Drawing on philosopher of science Larry Laudan’s (1978) distinction between the contexts of acceptance and the context of pursuit and conceptual tools from decision theory to frame the empirical findings, I argue that scientists’ assessments of the pursuitworthiness of interdisciplinary team science collaborations are shaped not only by expectations about potential epistemic benefits but also by forms of experiential knowledge acquired through prior collaborative experiences. Three key themes emerge from the interviews. First, scientists explore team-based approaches to achieve epistemic benefits they do not regard as attainable through independent investigator-led disciplinary research. Second, positive and negative experiences arising from these explorations generate experiential knowledge about collaborators and collaborations. Third, scientists subsequently exploit this experiential knowledge, which over time becomes incorporated into tacit practical guides that inform their judgments about whether to pursue future such collaborations. I end by identifying some of the limitations of the qualitative study, and identify some future directions for research.