The Transdisciplinary Team Science Initiative (TTSI), established in 2025 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, aims to identify effects of institutional resources on interdisciplinary science team performance and to link practical interventions with measurable outcomes. It also seeks to contribute to understanding how to develop team science coaches effectively. While there is emerging evidence on the positive impact of coaching on science team performance (Bauer et al., 2025; Stephens et al, 2024), there is very little evidence on how best to train and support team science coaches.

This project supports institutional best practices to help foster effective team science collaborations identified in the 2024 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Consensus Report on the state of team science (SciTS). One such institutional support is leveraging the use of research staff, such as research development (RD) and research administration (RA) professionals, as team science coaches (NASEM, 2025).

TTSI piloted a train-the-trainer coaching development program as part of a larger team science intervention for interdisciplinary teams who had recently received seed grant funding (N=6, total 21 members). The coaching intervention was focused on the project launch/team initiation stage which is one of the three critical times during a team's lifetime that can benefit from coaching (Hackman & Wageman, 2005). Coaches were not embedded in the project team itself but instead met with their assigned teams three times. During each session they facilitated an activity focused on an aspect of teamwork processes (Fiore, 2008) which has been shown to positively contribute to team functioning. Coaches were recruited (N = 5) from RD and RA staff from across the university and paired with science teams. Most coaches had no prior experience as a coach or with facilitating formal activities with teams.

Coaches participated in a six-hour orientation where they received professional development and training on team coaching competencies (Widdowson et al., 2020) including foundational knowledge (e.g., team science overview, team dynamics), professional knowledge (e.g., facilitation skills), self-knowledge (e.g., reflective practices), and contextual knowledge (e.g., social, cultural context for teams). The program also included a coach supervision component (Hawkins, 2025) which focused on providing opportunities for reflective practices to assist coaches in enhancing the quality of their coaching practice and group training and mentoring to help coaches further develop their skills and connect their practice with theory.

Ultimately, TTSI would like to expand this promising pilot into a larger demonstration project to meet the growing demand for team science coach professional development and training on our campus and beyond. We seek to invite dialogue with the SciTS community on considerations such as: What core skills and knowledge do team science coaches need? What are the implications for scaling in-person vs asynchronous coach development? What coach development considerations are there given the context of the coaching (e.g., coach embedded/not embedded on team, defined/not defined coaching period, distributed teams)? What ongoing coach supervision is needed and/or most effective?