the research team leader

• Research Process

Research Team Structure

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A scientific research team is a group of individuals, working to complete a research project successfully. When run well, the research team members work closely, and have clearly defined roles. Every team member should know their role, and how it plays into the project as a whole. Ultimately, the principal investigator is responsible for every aspect of the project.

In this article, we’ll review research team roles and responsibilities, and the typical structure of a scientific research team. If you are forming a research team, or are part of one, this information can help you ensure smooth operations and effective teamwork.

Team Members

A group of individuals working toward a common goal: that’s what a research team is all about. In this case, the shared goal between team members is the successful research, data analysis, publication and dissemination of meaningful findings. There are key roles that must be laid out BEFORE the project is started, and the “CEO” of the team, namely the Principal Investigator, must provide all the resources and training necessary for the team to successfully complete its mission.

Every research team is structured differently. However, there are five key roles in each scientific research team.

1. Principal Investigator (PI):

this is the person ultimately responsible for the research and overall project. Their role is to ensure that the team members have the information, resources and training they need to conduct the research. They are also the final decision maker on any issues related to the project. Some projects have more than one PI, so the designated individuals are known as Co-Principal Investigators.

PIs are also typically responsible for writing proposals and grant requests, and selecting the team members. They report to their employer, the funding organization, and other key stakeholders, including all legal as well as academic regulations. The final product of the research is the article, and the PI oversees the writing and publishing of articles to disseminate findings.

2. Project or Research Director:

This is the individual who is in charge of the day-to-day functions of the research project, including protocol for how research and data collection activities are completed. The Research Director works very closely with the Principal Investigator, and both (or all, if there are multiple PIs) report on the research.

Specifically, this individual designs all guidelines, refines and redirects any protocol as needed, acts as the manager of the team in regards to time and budget, and evaluates the progress of the project. The Research Director also makes sure that the project is in compliance with all guidelines, including federal and institutional review board regulations. They also usually assist the PI in writing the research articles related to the project, and report directly to the PI.

3. Project Coordinator or Research Associate:

This individual, or often multiple individuals, carry out the research and data collection, as directed by the Research Director and/or the Principal Investigator. But their role is to also evaluate and assess the project protocol, and suggest any changes that might be needed.

Project Coordinators or Research Associates also need to be monitoring any experiments regarding compliance with regulations and protocols, and they often help in reporting the research. They report to the Principal Investigator, Research Director, and sometimes the Statistician (see below).

4. Research Assistant:

This individual, or individuals, perform the day-to-day tasks of the project, including collecting data, maintaining equipment, ordering supplies, general clerical work, etc. Typically, the research assistant has the least amount of experience among the team members. Research Assistants usually report to the Research Associate/Project Coordinator, and sometimes the Statistician.

5. Statistician:

This is the individual who analyzes any data collected during the project. Sometimes they just analyze and report the data, and other times they are more involved in the organization and analysis of the research throughout the entire study. Their primary role is to make sure that the project produces reliable and valid data, and significant data via analysis methodology, sample size, etc. The Statistician reports both to the Principal Investigator and the Research Director.

Research teams may include people with different roles, such as clinical research specialists, interns, student researchers, lab technicians, grant administrators, and general administrative support staff. As mentioned, every role should be clearly defined by the team’s Principal Investigator. Obviously, the more complex the project, the more team members may be required. In such cases, it may be necessary to appoint several Principal Administrators and Research Directors to the research team.

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Building and managing a research team

Building your team, what is a research team.

What constitutes a research team in one department or institution might be described elsewhere as a research group, research centre, research unit or research institute. Regardless of the terminology used, the key characteristic of a research team is that it comprises a group of people working together in a committed way towards a common research goal.

Research team diversity

There are many different configurations of research teams in academia and boundaries can be 'fuzzy'. They may comprise co-investigators, fractional or pooled staff, technical and clerical staff and postgraduate research students. There may also be inter- and intra-institutional dimensions and increasingly international ones; some team members' contributions may well be largely virtual, via email, phone or videoconference.

Also, team members may have different disciplinary backgrounds, different motivations and aspirations, and different cultural backgrounds. Over time, team members' roles may change from being core (fully dedicated to the research goal) to peripheral (committed to this research goal, but also working in one or more other teams), and vice-versa.

Assessing the balance and composition of your team. 

Ideally, the balance and composition of the team in terms of skills, expertise and other contributions will be appropriate to achieve the team's objectives, i.e. for the  research goal the team is working towards. The research team leader needs to be confident that team members have, or can develop, the necessary skills and knowledge for the research in hand, and you will make recruitment decisions on that basis.

There is also another perspective on the effective team which it is good to consider. In addition to knowledge, experience and skills individuals have different behavioural traits or characteristics they bring to the way they carry out their work and these can be aligned to particular roles in the team: some are very good at seeing a big picture, others very good at detailed work. Some are very oriented towards action - good at just getting things done; others are natural communicators and networkers. The need for these different roles will emerge at different times and it is worth considering the composition of your team to ensure you have a balance of strengths. 

To find out more about specific team roles and the research by Meredith Belbin on which they are based, see the section further down this page. 

Managing your team

Your responsibilities as a manager of the group.

These are the responsibilities identified in Adair's action-centred leadership model :

• establish, agree and communicate standards of performance and behaviour
• establish style, culture, approach of the group - soft skill elements
• monitor and maintain discipline, ethics, integrity and focus on objectives
• anticipate and resolve group conflict, struggles or disagreements
• assess and change as necessary the balance and composition of the group
• develop team-working, cooperation, morale and team-spirit
• develop the collective maturity and capability of the group - progressively increase group freedom and authority
• encourage the team towards objectives and aims - motivate the group and provide a collective sense of purpose
• identify, develop and agree team- and project-leadership roles within group
• enable, facilitate and ensure effective internal and external group communications
• identify and meet group training needs
• give feedback to the group on overall progress; consult with, and seek feedback and input from the group.

Team  roles and development

A research team consists of people working together in a committed way towards a common research goal. Teams, like individuals and organisations mature and develop and have a fairly clearly defined growth cycle. Bruce Tuckman's 1965 four-stage model explains this cycle. It may be helpful  to reflect on your team's current stage of development  in order to identify relevant approaches to leadership and management. In addition to understanding the development of your team over time, having an understanding of the preferred ‘team roles', the characteristics and expected social behaviour, of individual team members, including the team leader, will help ensure that the team performs effectively together. Using team role or individual profiling tools can offer insights into building and maintaining an effective team, but team role analysis is most useful if all members evaluate their own and others' preferred roles, whichever tools are chosen.

There are a number of team role and individual profile tools available and your institution's staff development department or equivalent may have registered practitioners in one or more of these who can help you and your team understand your preferred team roles or working styles.

In the 1970s, Meredith Belbin and colleagues at the Henley Management College identified nine team roles, based on long-term psychometric tests and studies of business teams. Belbin defined team roles as "a tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way". The resulting role definitions fall into three categories, each with strengths and allowable weaknesses, and have been used widely in practice for team development in the intervening decades. Further research by Belbin has led to the addition of a tenth ‘Specialist' role in recent years. Watch this short introduction to the work of Belbin , or read about the team roles.

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How to Lead a Research Team

• First Online: 01 January 2020

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• Aimee-Noelle Swanson 2  

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Leadership. Organizational culture. Managing dynamic teams. Providing effective feedback. Did you miss this course in your advanced training? Is this the class that you slept through only to show up for the final exam – or was that really just a dream? You didn’t, and it was only a dream. Being an intentional leader and building the culture you want to maximize workflow and employee satisfaction is not something that is taught in graduate school. Very few institutions provide a didactic to scientists on how you build an effective organizational structure to deliver the best science possible. In academia, you are taught to think critically; to be a careful, well-reasoned scientist and clinician; and to approach problems with an objective eye, determine the root cause, and create impactful solutions. You are not taught how to be an effective leader, how to hire the right staff, how to engage teams in work during stressful periods, how to provide effective feedback to enhance performance, and how to build trust in a diverse team. However, you do have all of the tools that you need to do all of these things. You’ve been doing them for years and have seen them all around you. Now it’s just a matter of recognizing them for what they are and connecting with them in a way that serves your goals and objectives. That is the point of this chapter. In this chapter we will cover building an intentional organizational culture, being a thoughtful leader, and managing a research team so that with some foresight and effort, you can focus on your science while engaging your staff in meaningful, high-impact work as a team.

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These texts are valuable management and leadership tools for scientists. Consider these as key reference materials to set yourself up for success.

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Allen D. Getting things done: the art of stress-free productivity, revised edition. New York: Penguin Books; 2015.

Barker K. At the Helm: leading your laboratory. 2nd ed. Cold Spring Harbor: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press; 2010.

Cohen CM, Cohen SL. Lab dynamics: management and leadership skills for scientists. 2nd ed. Cold Spring Harbor: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press; 2012.

The Harvard Business Review (HRB). 10 Must Reads book series covers a wide range of topics with terrific resources and references.

Making the right moves: a practical guide to scientific management for postdocs and new faculty. 2nd ed. Burroughs Wellcome Fund and Howard Hughes Medical Institute; 2006. https://www.hhmi.org/developing-scientists/making-right-moves .

Patterson K, Grenny J, McMillan R, Switzler A. Crucial conversations: tools for talking when stakes are high. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Education; 2011.

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Swanson, AN. (2020). How to Lead a Research Team. In: Roberts, L. (eds) Roberts Academic Medicine Handbook. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31957-1_34

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Research Team Leadership in Changing Times

Effective leadership is critical to the success of any team. For those new to a research team leadership role, developing the necessary practical skills combined with the requirements of meeting research delivery objectives can be particularly challenging.

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As a participant on this programme, you will discover how to build and lead a research team, run effective research team meetings, support individual researchers and develop your role as a team leader; thus enhancing your capability as a research leader and developing your career potential. Particular attention will be given to the demands of accomplishing this in a virtual environment and through periods of uncertainty.

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Cultivating an Effective Research Team Through Application of Team Science Principles

Shirley L.T. Helm, MS, CCRP Senior Administrator for Network Capacity & Workforce Strategies

C. Kenneth & Dianne Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research

Virginia Commonwealth University

Abstract: The practice of team science allows clinical research professionals to draw from theory-driven principles to build an effective and efficient research team. Inherent in these principles are recognizing team member differences and welcoming diversity in an effort to integrate knowledge to solve complex problems. This article describes the basics of team science and how it can be applied to creating a highly-productive research team across the study continuum, including research administrators, budget developers, investigators, and research coordinators. The development of mutual trust, a shared vision, and open communication are crucial elements of a successful research team and research project. A case study illustrates the team science approach.

Introduction

Each research team is a community that requires trust, understanding, listening, and engagement. Stokols, Hall, Taylor, Moser, & Syme said that:

“There are many types of research teams, each one as dynamic as its team members. Research teams may comprise investigators from the same or different fields. Research teams also vary by size, organizational complexity, and geographic scope, ranging from as few as two individuals working together to a vast network of interdependent researchers across many institutions. Research teams have diverse goals spanning scientific discovery, training, clinical translation, public health, and health policy.” 1 1 Stokols D, Hall KL, Taylor BK, Moser RP. The science of team science: overview of the field and introduction to the supplement. Am J Prev Med. 2008 Aug;35(2 Suppl):S77-89. Accessed 8/10/20.

Team science arose from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, which fund the work of researchers attempting to solve some of the most complex problems that require a multi-disciplinary approach, such as childhood obesity. 2 Team science is bringing in elements from various disciplines to solve these major problems. 3, 4 This article covers the intersection of team science with effective operationalizing of research teams and how teaming principles can be applied to the functioning of research teams.

Salas and colleagues state that, “a team consists of two or more individuals, who have specific roles, perform interdependent tasks, are adaptable, and share a common goal. . . team members must possess individual and team Knowledge, Skills, Attitudes ….” 5 Great teams have a plan for how people act and work together. There are three elements that must be aligned to ensure success: the individual, the team, and the task. Individuals have their own goals. These goals must align, and not compete with, goals of other individuals and team goals. Task goals are the nuts and bolts of clinical research. Like individuals, the team has an identity. It is necessary to provide feedback both as a team and as individuals.

In a typical clinical research team, the clinical investigator is at the center surrounded by the clinical research coordinators. The coordinator is the person who makes the team function. Other members of the typical clinical research team are:

· Research participant/family

· Financial/administrative staff

· Regulatory body (institutional review board)

· Study staff

· Ancillary services such as radiology or pathology

· Sponsor/monitor.

The Teaming Principles

Bruce Tuckman developed the teaming principles in 1965 and revised them in 1977 (Table 1). 6 Using the teaming principles is not a linear process. These principles start with establishing the team. The team leader does not have to establish the team. Any team member can use teaming principles to provide a framework and structure and systematically determine what the project needs. Storming is establishing roles and responsibilities, communications, and processes. The storming phase, when everybody has been brought together and is on board with the same goal, is a honeymoon period.

Norming is the heavy lifting of the team’s work. This involves working together effectively and efficiently. Team members must develop trust and comfort with each other. Performing focuses on working together efficiently, and satisfaction for team members and the research participants and their families.

Tuckman added adjourning or transforming to the teaming principles in 1977. The team might end or start working on a new project (study) with a new shared goal. Adjourning or transforming involves determining which processes can be transferred from one research study to another research study.

While the teaming principles seem intuitive and like common sense, people are not raised to be fully cooperative. Using the teaming principles provides framework and structure and takes the emotion out of teamwork. The teaming principles empower team members and provide the structure that is necessary for teams, which are constantly evolving and changing.

The shared goal at the center of the teaming principles provides a sense of purpose. This provides commitment, responsibility, and accountability, along with a clear understanding of roles, responsibilities, competencies, expectations, and contributions. In Dare to lead: Brave work. Tough conversations. Whole hearts, Brené Brown coined the phrase, “clear is kind, unclear is unkind.” 7 It is extremely important to define roles and ensure that each team member knows what the other team members are doing. This prevents duplication of effort and ensures that tasks do not fall through the cracks.

How to Use Teaming Principles

Table 2 briefly describes each of the five teaming principles. Forming begins with gathering the team members and involves determining who is needed on the team to ensure success. Each team member must be valued. The team may vary depending upon the study, project, and timelines. During the research study, team members may enter and exit from the team. Forming the team may mean working across boundaries with people and departments that team members do not know. It is also necessary to establish the required competencies and knowledge, skills, and attitudes of team members, and to recognize and celebrate differences. The team must have a shared goal and vision.

Storming the team involves establishing roles, responsibilities, and tasks. This includes determining who has the required competencies to perform tasks such as completing pre-screening logs or consenting research participants. Also, storming involves defining processes, including communication pathways and expectations. Simply sending an email is not an effective way to communicate. Team members need to know whether an email is providing information or requires a response. Expectations for responding to emails should be described and agreed upon by all team members. Emails might be color coded to show whether an email is informational or requires a response. If clinical research sites utilize a clinical trial management system, the process for updating it must be determined and clearly communicated.

Norming is how team members work together. The shared goal is re-visited often under norming. Team members are mutually dependent upon each other and must meet their commitments and established deadlines.

Trust lies at the heart of the team. Building trust takes work and does not come naturally. It is helpful to understand that there are several types of trust. Identity-based trust is based on personal understanding and is usually seen in relationships between partners, spouses, siblings, or best friends. This type of trust does not usually occur in the workplace.

Workplace trust resides in calculus-based trust and competence-based trust. Calculus-based trust is about keeping commitments, meeting deadlines, and meeting expectations. There are some people who can be counted upon to always do what they are supposed to do. These people have earned calculus-based trust. Competence-based trust is confidence in another person’s skills or competencies.

Swift trust is immediate and necessary during extreme situations where there is not time to develop deeper connections with individuals. It relies on personal experiences, stereotypes, and biases. Some people are naturally more trusting than other people.

The teaming principle of performing involves satisfaction in progressing toward the goal and being proactive in preventing issues from arising. There will always be issues; however, the most effective teams learn from issues and have processes for resolving them. This makes a team efficient. Performing also includes revisiting the shared goal, embracing diversity and differences, and continually improving knowledge, skills, and attitudes.

Adjourning/transforming is the completion of tasks and identification of lessons learned. Team members need to circle back and determine what worked well and can be applied to the next study. Celebrating successes and acknowledging the contributions of all team members are also an aspect of adjourning/transforming. When the author was managing a core laboratory, she performed tests for an oncology investigator’s study. Months later, the investigator gave her a thank-you card for her contribution to the study that was unexpected but greatly appreciated.

Strengthening the Team

Without a framework and structure, team dysfunction is likely. In The five dysfunctions of a team: A leadership fable , Lencioni presented team dysfunction as a pyramid. 8 Absence of trust is at the bottom of the pyramid. Absence of trust results in questioning everything people do and results in team members unwilling to share or to ask for help. Without asking for help, mistakes will be made.

Absence of trust leads to a fear of conflict and an inability to resolve issues or improve efficiencies. Fear of conflict leads to lack of commitment. Doubt prevails, team members lack confidence, and the goal is diminished. Team dysfunction leads to avoidance of accountability. Follow-through is poor and mediocrity is accepted, breeding resentment among team members.

At the top of the team dysfunction pyramid is inattention to results, which leads to loss of team members and future research studies. There are some teams where people are constantly moving in and out. This is

a symptom of team dysfunction. Loss of respect and reputation of the team, department, and individual team members is another consequence of inattention to results.

Table 3 highlights ways to strengthen the team. Recognizing the strengths of each team member starts with self-awareness. For example, the author had to understand her communication and learning style and how this is similar to and different than that of other team members. The VIA Institute of Character offers a free assessment that could be a fun activity for research teams.

There is no one road to self-awareness; however, each team member must recognize that other team members do not necessarily share their understanding or perceptions. There are many options and possibilities for how others may understand or perceive an experience, none of which are right or wrong. Each team member should appreciate that different understanding and perceptions of experiences do not have to threaten their identity or relationships.

One quick way to show this is through ambiguous images, in which people see entirely different things in the same image. Once they are aware that there are different ways of seeing the same thing, they can appreciate other perspectives. As Pablo Picasso said, “There is only one way to see things, until someone shows us how to look at them with different eyes.” Strengthening the team requires embracing demographic, educational, and personality diversity.

Open and honest communication should be encouraged. Team members should give and receive constructive feedback. This is a learned skill that is often difficult. However, tools are available for assessing communication and listening styles. Many institutions and human resource departments utilize the Crucial Conversations program by VitalSmarts, LC. One member of the team can participate in Crucial Conversations and bring the knowledge back to the team. Communication must include managing conflict and an awareness of cultural differences.

Opportunities for education and training to acquire new knowledge, skills, and attitudes/competencies should be provided. Education may be transportable across teams or may be study specific. Team members should be cross-trained, which may be accomplished through several methods. Positional clarification is where one person is told what another person is doing, which is primarily for information transfer. Positional modeling is receiving the information but also shadowing the other person while they perform the task/skill. Positional rotation is performing another person’s job. This is best for back-up positions, which are necessary for research teams.

Team success is facilitated by recognizing individual successes and commitment to shared goals. Recognizing individual successes reflects team success. For example, if a team member becomes a certified clinical research professional, this is a success for both the individual and the team. Also, the team must have a shared understanding of the goal or purpose. This shared goal must be linked to the individual goal of each team member.

Teamwork needs constant attention and annual evaluations, and team meetings are not sufficient. It is extremely important to regularly check in with people. Team members can check in with other team members simply to ask how things are going. Misunderstandings should be dealt with immediately. Clear direction, accountability, and rewards are necessary.

The author has a bell on her desk that team members ring when they have a success. This sounds cheesy, however, it is fun and team members really enjoy it. For example, when the author finished her slides for the SOCRA annual conference on time, she rang the bell. Her team members asked what happened, and they had a mini celebration. This small item helps to build and strengthen a team with small successes leading to larger successes.

Case Study Using the Teaming Principles

The following case study illustrates the application of the teaming principles to a team involving four major players. Olivia is a clinician with three clinic days and teaching duties who is a sought-after speaker for international conferences. In addition, Olivia is the clinical investigator for four clinical research studies: two studies are active, one is in long-term follow up, and one is in closeout. The studies are a blend of industry sponsored and investigator initiated. Olivia is also a co-clinical investigator on two additional studies and relies heavily upon Ansh for coordination of all studies and management of two research assistants.

Ansh is the lead research coordinator with seven years of experience in critical care research. Ansh is very detail-oriented and takes pride in error-free case report forms, coordinates with external monitors, and manages two research assistants as well as the day-to-day operations of Olivia’s research studies.

Bernita is a research assistant with six months of work experience in obtaining informed consents, scheduling study visits, and coordinating with ancillary services. Bernita is responsible for contacting participants for scheduled visits and providing participant payments. Bernita is developing coordinating skills, seeks out training and educational opportunities, and is a real people person.

Delroy is the regulatory affairs specialist for the Critical Care Department, which consists of eight clinicians (not all of whom are engaged in research). Studies include one multi-site clinical trial for which the clinical research site is the coordinating site, and one faculty-held Investigational New Drug/Investigational Device Exemption study. The department’s studies are a mixture of federal- and industry-funded studies. Delroy has been with the department for five years in this capacity. However, Delroy’s coworker recently and unexpectedly took family and medical leave, leaving Delroy to manage all regulatory issues for the department. Also, the department chair recently made growing the department’s industry-sponsored study portfolio a priority.

Olivia has received an invitation to be added as a clinical research site for a highly sought-after ongoing Phase II, multisite, industry-sponsored study comparing two asthma medications in an adult outpatient setting. The study uses a central institutional review board (IRB) and has competitive enrollment. It will require the following ancillary services: investigational pharmacy, radiology, and outpatient asthma clinic nursing. For the purposes of this case study, all contracts have been negotiated and all of the regulatory documents are available (e.g., FDA Form 1572, informed consent template, and the current protocol). The institution utilizes a clinical trial management system.

Oliva shares the study information and study enrollment goals with Ansh with the charge of getting this study activated and enrolling within 40 days. What are the potential barriers that might affect this outcome? One potential barrier to the study activation timeline is Delroy’s heavy workload. To ensure that the timeline is met, Ansh might contact Delroy and explain the situation, asking what Ansh can do to help facilitate study start-up to ensure that the timeline is met. Ansh should be clear in determining what Delroy needs for study activation, the deadlines for each item, and assist in facilitation of communicating to other members of the study activation team (e.g., ancillary services, IRB) what is needed. Priorities include the regulatory work and staff training. Barriers include managing the regulatory issues on time. This might be a good opportunity to connect with Bernita for providing Delroy some assistance, as Bernita is knowledgeable and eager to acquire additional skills and training. The shared goal of starting the study on time should be shared with all team members in order to meet the 40 day study activation and enrollment goal.

Nuggets for Success as a Team Member or Leader

Members of a research team must know the other team members and available resources. They need to know who is needed for a particular study. This will change during studies and across studies. Roles and responsibilities among the broader team should be identified.

Table 4 outlines nuggets of success as a team member or leader, starting with using the framework of the teaming principles. Next, the team member or leader should build and create networks for knowledge and access. A knowledge network enables team members to know who to contact to provide an answer to specific questions. Each team member is a knowledge network for someone else. Also, each team member should find a person who they admire to serve as a mentor, even informally.

Team members should take advantage of available training. LinkedIn has many free training programs, and the institution’s human resources department also offers training. Meeting times should be scheduled to set aside time for reflection. Team members should check in often with the team as a whole and individual team members, set realistic boundaries, and establish priorities. Team members should avoid making assumptions, and instead, communicate clearly and often. Other keys to team success are to be respectful and present, participate, and practice humanity.

This work was supported by CTSA award No. UL1TR002649 from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent official views of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences or the National Institutes of Health.

Overview of the Teaming Principles

• Establish team (top-down and bottom-up)
• Establish roles and responsibilities, communications, and processes
• Working together effectively and efficiently
• Individuals develop trust and comfort
• Work together efficiently
• Focus on a shared vision
• Resolves issues
• Natural end:dissolution
• New project (study) with a new shared goal

Description of the Teaming Principles

• Team members may vary depending upon the study, project, and timelines
• Work across boundaries
• Appropriate competencies and knowledge, skills, and attitudes
• Recognize and celebrate differences
• Shared goal and vision
• Determining who has the competencies for specific study tasks
• Communication pathways and expectation
• Completing clinical trial management systems updates
• Revisit the shared goal often
• Requires mutual dependence
• Identity-based: personal understanding
• Calculus-based: keep commitments, meet deadlines, meet expectations
• Competence-based: confidence in skills, competencies of another
• Satisfaction in progressing toward goal
• Proactive in preventing issues from arising
• Revisit the shared goal
• Embrace diversity and differences
• Continuous improvement in knowledge, skills, and attitudes
• Completion of tasks
• Identify lessons learned
• Celebrate success and acknowledge the contributions of all
• Self-awareness and assessments
• Demographic
• Educational
• Personality
• Give and receive constructive feedback
• Acquire new knowledge, skills, and attitudes/competencies
• Cross-train
• Recognize individual success, which reflects team success
• Commit to shared goals

Nuggets of Success as a Team Member of Leader

• Use the teaming principles as a framework
• Build and create networks for knowledge and access
• Find a mentor
• Take advantage of training
• Schedule meeting times for reflection
• Check in with the team and team members
• Set boundaries and priorities
• Never make assumptions
• Be respectful and present
• Participate
• Practice humanity

1 Stokols D, Hall KL, Taylor BK, Moser RP. The science of team science: overview of the field and introduction to the supplement. Am J Prev Med. 2008 Aug;35(2 Suppl):S77-89. Accessed 8/10/20.

2 Bennett LM, Gadlin H, Marchand C. Team Collaboration Field Guide. Publication No. 18-7660, 2nd ed., National Institutes of Health; 2018. Accessed 8/10/20.

3 National Research Council. Enhancing the Effectiveness of Team Science. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press; 2015. Accessed 8/10/20.

4 Teambuilding 1: How to build effective teams in healthcare. Nursing Times. Accessed 8/10/20.

5 Salas E, Dickinson TL, Converse SA. Toward an Understanding of Team Performance and Training. In: Swezey R W, Salas E, editors. Teams: Their Training and Performance. Norwood, NJ: Ablex; 1992. pp. 3–29.

6 Tuckman, BW, Jensen MA. Stages of small-group development revisited. Group and Organization Studies, 2. 1977: 419-427.

7 Brown B. Dare to lead: Brave work. Tough conversations. Whole hearts. New York: Random House, 2018.

8 Lencioni P. The five dysfunctions of a team: A leadership fable. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass: 2002.

One thought on “Cultivating an Effective Research Team Through Application of Team Science Principles”

Hey there! I just finished reading your article on cultivating an effective research team through the application of team science principles, and I couldn’t help but drop a comment. First off, kudos to you for sharing such valuable insights. Your article was not only informative but also highly engaging, making it a pleasure to read.

I particularly resonated with your emphasis on the importance of clear communication and collaboration within research teams. It’s incredible how these seemingly simple principles can make such a significant difference in the success of a research project. Your practical tips on fostering trust and encouraging diversity of thought were spot-on. I’ve had my fair share of experiences in research teams, and I can attest that when everyone is on the same page and feels heard, the results are remarkable. Your article has given me a fresh perspective on how to approach team dynamics in my future research endeavors, and I’ll definitely be sharing these insights with my colleagues. Thanks again for sharing your wisdom! Looking forward to more of your articles in the future.

Keep up the fantastic work, and please continue to share your expertise. Your writing style is not only informative but also very relatable, making complex topics like team science principles easy to grasp. I’ll be eagerly awaiting your next piece. Until then, wishing you all the best in your research and writing endeavors! 😊📚

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How to Lead a Research Team in 4 Steps

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Despite talent management in research being  the greatest driver of research success , researchers are seldom taught how to lead a research team well.

In fact,  research from the Wellcome Trust  where over 4,000 scientists were surveyed, reveals that while 80% of lead researchers say they have the skills to manage a diverse team, less than half of research leaders have had any management training.

Successfully implementing talent management practices in a time-sensitive laboratory environment can be complex and  remains a key area in need of improvement even for industry leaders  in the scientific field.

However, when leaders do rise to the challenge, they can generate an environment of continual improvement, increased efficiency and greater satisfaction.  In this article, I’ll outline 4 key steps, inspired by Psychologist Bruce Tuckman’s notorious  theory of group development .  Expect to find: 

• 4 steps to successful leadership
• Research and insights on laboratory leadership
• Key skills information for research leaders

Four key steps to leadership success

Step 1 – form a vision and set your strategy.

While mission statements involve describing the purpose of your research itself, a vision statement should outline the project’s full trajectory while staying connected to the mission. 

Your wider strategy and vision statement should include details around:

• Staff career plans – understanding your team’s ideal career trajectory will enable you to better share opportunities and responsibilities.
• Timelines for the project – clarifying clear timelines from the start can improve your chances of gaining additional funding.
• Communication channels – find reliable ways to maintain communication, ideally through weekly updates.
• Financial goals – aim for any additional funding opportunities from the project’s outset.
• Approach to work-life balance – understanding your team’s need for a work-life balance will help shape the trajectory of the project, and timelines, by setting realistic goals
• Development opportunities – describe any additional training and development opportunities that are available over the course of the project
• Enabling innovation – foster a creative environment from the outset, creating a psychologically safe environment where people can suggest new ideas.
• Building connections – collaboration can open up a wealth of opportunity and resource.

Vision statements should be a collaborative affair, where your team contribute their perspectives to shape a realistic and meaningful vision for the project. 

A strong research vision describes the unique way a challenge will be addressed in context of its wider societal, environmental or even industrial impact.

Syngenta  accomplish this with the vision statement below:

“Our vision is a bright future for smallholder farming. To strengthen smallholder farming and food systems, we catalyze market development and delivery of innovations, while building capacity across the public and private sectors” Leadership tip:  While creativity is often regarded as key to research culture,   75% of researchers believe it’s being stalled.  Overcoming this takes conscious action, and psychological safety.  Google’s research  shows that psychological safety is one of the greatest drivers for successful teamwork. Leaders can achieve a more innovative, and successful team culture by showing concern for wellbeing alongside success. 

Step 2 – Bridge communication gaps and work through the challenges

Once you’ve successfully set up the vision and strategy behind your project, your attention can shift onto working through the challenges that arise and bridging any communication gaps that emerge. Your focus as a leader should be on promoting learning and providing the constructive feedback needed to help your team turn mistakes into lessons learned. 

When faced with a hurdle, consider additional training where skills are insufficient, and stay committed even if the project isn’t going at the pace you expected.

Leadership tip:  It’s also important to practice self-awareness and identify whether any research challenges could be down to your leadership style. If you don’t find your leadership style to be driving your team’s motivation, be prepared to change up your approach.  Research  shows you can do this by asking ‘what’ you can do to change, rather than focusing too much on ‘why’ your approach wasn’t successful. 

Step 3 – Sustain performance

Now your project has overcome its growing pains, it’s likely that productivity has increased and that you’re looking for ways to keep that momentum going. 

Emphasising project ownership and accountability is integral at this stage and can help  sustain motivation and commitment  to the research. As the research continues, it’s important to leverage communication channels, and keep conversations and ideas flowing – doing so, will better enable problem solving if further issues do arise. 

Your responsibilities will largely shift at this point to monitoring:

• Time  – the time it takes to complete projects, as well as the time the team are spending in the lab.
• Money  – how finances are progressing, and whether further resourcing may be required.
• Quality of work  – the quality of work should take a greater focus over the quantity of work, although both are important.
• Work-life balance  – refer back to the vision for the project; is the same work-life balance being maintained?
• Burnout  – monitor employee wellbeing and try to identify signs of employee burnout early.

Leadership tip:  To maintain productivity, it’s important to move away from a competitive culture.  78% of researchers think that high levels of competition in the laboratory have created unkind, and aggressive conditions . Celebrate achievements and consider how you can help encourage team growth and development rather than focusing on a competitive environment.

Step 4 - Prepare for wrap-up

As the project draws to a close, your role as a leader should shift on to developing your team member’s career beyond the project. You can refer back to your project vision, as well as actively communicate with your wider team to ensure that every member is accessing the opportunities that they need to transition to their next research project and role.

You could organise a final event for the team to celebrate personal achievements alongside overall team achievements to close the project in a positive way.

Leadership tip:  Establishing a successful offboarding process as a leader is crucial to maintaining a strong network with wider research teams, even after project completion. 

Skills breakdown:

Key skills Research Managers require to  achieve laboratory success  are:

• Self-awareness
• Time management
• Accountability

Looking for resource support?

At  Synergy , we provide specialist teams that boost laboratory capability, potential and efficiency from within. (www.srgtalent.com/clients/our-services/synergy-scientific-solutions) 

Our links with SRG’s expansive talent networks mean we can source, manage and develop teams on behalf of our clients across the clinical and biotech industries.

Want to learn more? Get in touch with our team at:  [email protected]  

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What They Do

What does a Research Team Leader do?

A research team leader assists the project directors in defining the objectives, strategies, responsibilities, and tasks for the team members. They also guarantee that all the research is done correctly and promptly to ensure objectives are met. They also ensure all the activities are limited to the annual or project budget.

• Responsibilities
• Skills And Traits
• Comparisions
• Types of Research Team Leader

Research team leader responsibilities

A research team leader plays a crucial role in guiding the team's research efforts and ensuring the successful completion of projects. According to Jeffrey Knopf , Professor and Program Chair of Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies at Middlebury College, "Good communication skills are still number one. The ability to write well and communicate clearly will always help you." A research team leader must also possess strong qualitative research skills and be able to "learn from history or understand other cultures." Furthermore, expertise in data analytics or imagery analysis is increasingly in demand. In addition to these responsibilities, Giovanna Percontino, Communication Career Coach, M.Ed., advises research team leaders to "Take a salary negotiation workshop at U Career Success. Research the current trends and salaries." to increase their earning potential.

Here are examples of responsibilities from real research team leader resumes:

• Develop and implement strategic merchandising plans to achieve revenue objectives and reduce expenditures while ensuring payroll remains within budget.
• Prepare agenda for IRB meeting.
• Conduct research for FDA and FDA associate companies.
• Utilize SPSS to analyze survey data and gain meaningful insights for new and existing EDMC program and product strategy.
• Recode variables collect and analyze data on SPSS to determine if there are significant correlations
• Provide continuous service by assisting customers to troubleshoot voice and data communications equipment and support of contingency planning for service interruptions.
• Assist in writing NIH grants and animal research protocols.
• Participate in grant application preparation which are accepted/funded fund by the NIH.
• Manage expanding mouse colony including genotyping.

Research team leader skills and personality traits

We calculated that 14 % of Research Team Leaders are proficient in Data Analysis , Data Collection , and R . They’re also known for soft skills such as Analytical skills , Communication skills , and Detail oriented .

We break down the percentage of Research Team Leaders that have these skills listed on their resume here:

Manage and train a team of analysts in research best practices, supervising and advising their data analysis and presentation.

Guide interviewing staff and provide feedback on data collection and administrative quality for the successful completion of data collection activities.

Coached undergraduate members to identify data sources, analyze feasibility of project and use R programmingand Excel basically.

Co-composed Institutional Review Board (IRB) proposal.

Trained and experienced in FDA QSR 21, Part 11 related to medical devices.

Supervised interviewers conducting market research.

"data analysis," "data collection," and "r" are among the most common skills that research team leaders use at work. You can find even more research team leader responsibilities below, including:

Analytical skills. One of the key soft skills for a research team leader to have is analytical skills. You can see how this relates to what research team leaders do because "market research analysts must evaluate large amounts of data and information related to market conditions." Additionally, a research team leader resume shows how research team leaders use analytical skills: "directed 5 researchers in a cognitive science laboratory experiment, overseeing theoretical strategy, experimental procedure, data collection, and analysis"

Communication skills. Another soft skill that's essential for fulfilling research team leader duties is communication skills. The role rewards competence in this skill because "market research analysts must be able to clearly convey information when gathering material, interpreting data, and presenting results to clients." According to a research team leader resume, here's how research team leaders can utilize communication skills in their job responsibilities: "engaged with clients utilizing strong communication skills to perform market research. "

Detail oriented. research team leaders are also known for detail oriented, which are critical to their duties. You can see how this skill relates to research team leader responsibilities, because "market research analysts must pay attention to minutiae to evaluate data." A research team leader resume example shows how detail oriented is used in the workplace: "identified relative-value and capital structure arbitrage opportunities through detailed financial models and in-depth analysis of companies and related industries. "

All research team leader skills

The three companies that hire the most research team leaders are:

• Charles River Labs 3 research team leaders jobs
• Wells Fargo 3 research team leaders jobs
• Charles River Center 3 research team leaders jobs

Choose from 10+ customizable research team leader resume templates

Compare different research team leaders

Research team leader vs. marketing consultant.

A marketing consultant is responsible for utilizing their extensive retail expertise to develop strategies on how to strengthen client base and achieve better sales. Furthermore, a marketing consultant must perform research and analysis to determine opportunities for financial gains, devise plans to improve client satisfaction, assess the competition, look out for any risks, and develop its brand and image. They should also ensure that all steps taken adhere to the policies and regulations of the organization.

There are some key differences in the responsibilities of each position. For example, research team leader responsibilities require skills like "data analysis," "data collection," "r," and "institutional review." Meanwhile a typical marketing consultant has skills in areas such as "customer service," "web content," "media sales," and "digital marketing." This difference in skills reveals the differences in what each career does.

Research team leader vs. Marketing specialist

A marketing specialist's primary responsibility revolves around conducting thorough market research and analysis to acquire extensive knowledge and understanding of a brand and how it will work in the consumer market. They must determine and come up with strategies and utilize this to develop various programs or campaigns that would be vital in bringing more awareness to the brand, thus boosting sales and improving client base. Furthermore, a marketing specialist must also use their expertise to figure out new opportunities and trends that will work for the company.

Each career also uses different skills, according to real research team leader resumes. While research team leader responsibilities can utilize skills like "data analysis," "data collection," "r," and "institutional review," marketing specialists use skills like "digital marketing," "marketing campaigns," "project management," and "email marketing."

Research team leader vs. Marketing assistant

A marketing assistant's general responsibility is to support the marketing programs and campaigns by sharing recommendations and useful insights to improve the brand's image. Marketing assistants' duties also include reaching out to other personnel for necessary files needed on promotional advertisements, assist the team in creating designs and developing content, publishing brochures for potential clients, analyzing sales reports, and researching the current market trends. A marketing assistant should have excellent organizational and time-management skills to meet deadlines and perform various tasks as required.

The required skills of the two careers differ considerably. For example, research team leaders are more likely to have skills like "data analysis," "data collection," "r," and "institutional review." But a marketing assistant is more likely to have skills like "customer service," "marketing campaigns," "facebook," and "trade shows."

Research team leader vs. Marketing associate

A marketing associate's responsibility is to perform comprehensive market research to identify the latest trends that would provide opportunities to improve the business' marketing strategies. A marketing associate's duties also include creating sales reports and advertising materials, coordinating with the sales team for promotional events, assists with the planning and execution of marketing strategies, evaluating customer satisfaction, and handling administrative tasks as needed. Marketing associates must also have excellent communication skills to help in managing client inquiries and resolve complaints immediately.

Types of research team leader

Team leader.

• Marketing Consultant

Research Manager

• Research Leader

Updated April 25, 2024

Editorial Staff

The Zippia Research Team has spent countless hours reviewing resumes, job postings, and government data to determine what goes into getting a job in each phase of life. Professional writers and data scientists comprise the Zippia Research Team.

What Similar Roles Do

• What a Data Research Analyst Does
• What a Leader Does
• What a Market Researcher Does
• What a Marketing Assistant Does
• What a Marketing Associate Does
• What a Marketing Consultant Does
• What a Marketing Coordinator Does
• What a Marketing Internship Does
• What a Marketing Representative Does
• What a Marketing Specialist Does
• What a Research Analyst Does
• What a Research Consultant Does
• What a Research Director Does
• What a Research Internship Does
• What a Research Leader Does

Research Team Leader Related Careers

• Data Research Analyst
• Market Researcher
• Marketing Assistant
• Marketing Associate
• Marketing Coordinator
• Marketing Internship
• Marketing Representative
• Marketing Specialist
• Research Analyst
• Research Consultant
• Research Director
• Research Internship

Research Team Leader Related Jobs

Resume for related jobs.

• Data Research Analyst Resume
• Leader Resume
• Market Researcher Resume
• Marketing Assistant Resume
• Marketing Associate Resume
• Marketing Consultant Resume
• Marketing Coordinator Resume
• Marketing Internship Resume
• Marketing Representative Resume
• Marketing Specialist Resume
• Research Analyst Resume
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Team principles for successful interdisciplinary research teams

Sherry-ann brown.

a Cardio-Oncology Program, Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI, USA

b Department of Cardiovascular Medicine, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, USA

Rodney Sparapani

c Institute for Health and Equity, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI, USA

Kristen Osinski

d Clinical Science and Translational Institute, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI, USA

e Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI, USA

Jeffrey Blessing

f Department of Computer Science, Milwaukee School of Engineering, USA

Feixiong Cheng

g Genomic Medicine Institute, Lerner Research Institute, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, OH, USA

h Department of Molecular Medicine, Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA

Abdulaziz Hamid

i Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI, USA

Mehri Bagheri MohamadiPour

Jessica castrillon lal, anai n. kothari.

j Division of Surgical Oncology, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI, USA

Pedro Caraballo

k Department of Medicine, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, USA

Peter Noseworthy

Roger h. johnson.

l Cancer Center, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI, USA

Kathryn Hansen

m Green Bay, WI, USA

Louise Y. Sun

n Division of Cardiac Anesthesiology, University of Ottawa Heart Institute, School of Epidemiology and Public Health, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada

Bradley Crotty

o Department of Medicine, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI, USA

Yee Chung Cheng

Gift echefu.

p Department of Internal Medicine, Baton Rouge General Medical Center, Baton Rouge, LA, USA

Krishna Doshi

q Department of Internal Medicine, Advocate Lutheran General Hospital, Park Ridge, IL, USA

Jessica Olson

Interdisciplinary research teams can be extremely beneficial when addressing difficult clinical problems. The incorporation of conceptual and methodological strategies from a variety of research disciplines and health professions yields transformative results. In this setting, the long-term goal of team science is to improve patient care, with emphasis on population health outcomes. However, team principles necessary for effective research teams are rarely taught in health professional schools. To form successful interdisciplinary research teams in cardio-oncology and beyond, guiding principles and organizational recommendations are necessary. Cardiovascular disease results in annual direct costs of $220 billion (about $680 per person in the US) and is the leading cause of death for cancer survivors, including adult survivors of childhood cancers. Optimizing cardio-oncology research in interdisciplinary research teams has the potential to aid in the investigation of strategies for saving hundreds of thousands of lives each year in the United States and mitigating the annual cost of cardiovascular disease. Despite published reports on experiences developing research teams across organizations, specialties and settings, there is no single journal article that compiles principles for cardiology or cardio-oncology research teams. In this review, recurring threads linked to working as a team, as well as optimal methods, advantages, and problems that arise when managing teams are described in the context of career development and research. The worth and hurdles of a team approach, based on practical lessons learned from establishing our multidisciplinary research team and information gleaned from relevant specialties in the development of a successful team are presented.

1. Introduction

Interdisciplinary teams produce powerful collaborative research ( 1 ). Interdisciplinary research teams, as described by the National Institute of Health and a Scientific Statement from the American Heart Association are critical for tackling challenging clinical problems ( 1 , 2 ). Impactful and transformative results are obtained by incorporating conceptual and methodological strategies from a variety of research disciplines and health professions ( 1 ). In this paper, we outline principles for a successful research team, with a particular emphasis on their effectiveness in cardio-oncology settings. Interdisciplinary teams are becoming more critical for collaborative scientific discoveries, necessitating careful strategies to meet research aims while overcoming potential conflicts ( 3 ). Team approaches offer a greater pool of viewpoints, capabilities, and efforts. The prevalence of cardiovascular disease in adults in the general population is ∼50 % (including hypertension) and ∼10 % (excluding hypertension) ( 4 ), associated with ∼$220 billion in direct costs annually ( 4 ). Cardiovascular disease is also a leading cause of death among cancer survivors ( [5] , [6] , [7] ). Nearly 17 million Americans are cancer survivors ( 8 ), a number that is expected to exceed 22 million by 2030 ( 9 ). Approximately 500,000 of these adults are survivors of childhood cancers; 1 in every 750 Americans is a survivor of childhood cancer ( 8 , 10 ). 1 in 10 childhood cancer survivors are at high risk for cardiovascular disease and will develop cardiovascular disease ( 11 ). Optimizing cardio-oncology research in interdisciplinary research teams will help investigate how to save hundreds of thousands of lives each year in the United States and to help mitigate the annual cost of cardiovascular disease, which is expected to more than double over the next two decades ( 12 ). Interdisciplinary research teams should therefore be leveraged for cardiology, and especially cardio-oncology, to maximize research outcomes for translation to patient care.

Several groups have reported their experiences with building research teams in various specialties and settings. Few journal articles provide practical methods for building team infrastructure, this is particularly unavailable in cardiology, or cardio-oncology. Providing such a publication will help in creating a collaborative atmosphere, particularly one that includes opportunities for learning and team building ( 13 ). This requires that translational teams have the abilities, expertise, and mindset to overcome obstacles and capitalize on the benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration ( 14 ). These skills are developed using successful tactics ( 14 ), including understanding the problem space; identifying translational challenges that need to be addressed by the team; and identifying potential strategies to meet the identified translational team needs ( 14 ).

Coalescing key team principles is helpful for groups of researchers and clinicians interested in building interdisciplinary teams, particularly those that will incorporate training and mentorship as part of career development goals for the entire team. Therefore, in this article, suggestions for success in interdisciplinary teams are offered based on comprehensive literature review, integrated with lessons learned from our own experience. In a companion article titled “Establishing an Interdisciplinary Research Team for Cardio-Oncology Artificial Intelligence Informatics Precision and Health Equity”, the process of building an optimal interdisciplinary research team customized for our group, along with initial findings from an epidemiological cohort developed by our team, are described ( 15 ).

2. Forming interdisciplinary research teams

The successful interdisciplinary research team includes individuals from a variety of specialties ( 16 ). Networking is advantageous for establishing and reestablishing connections ( 17 ) to develop a pool from which to build the team, or from whom potential team members can be identified ( 3 ). When forming the interdisciplinary team, several factors must be considered ( 3 ). Foremost, the establishment of a needs analysis to inform the setting of priorities is crucial for effectively forming an interdisciplinary team in a high-stress, fast-changing healthcare environment ( 17 , 18 ). Next, interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers, administrators, and clinicians from various allied health specialties should be carefully crafted ( 18 ). Clinical health experts can provide a variety of insights to the project as well as mentorship ( 18 ). Building a team entails bringing people together and providing psychological safety for all teammates, while having a shared research aim ( 3 ). Determine team dynamics that persuade the group to create trust, enhance communication, and collaborate towards a shared purpose ( 17 ). Team composition in research is an essential factor that influences overall performance. Team processes and results related to team effectiveness are influenced by team structure, tasks, and organizational context ( 19 ). In establishing a well-rounded research team, the fundamental concepts to consider include team objectives, team member characteristics (such as competency and personality), team diversity and demographics, and project timeline ( 20 ). Roles and tasks should be clearly assigned to the extent possible, to limit ambiguity and permit recognition of each member's efforts ( 3 ). Establishing rules entails agreeing on how the team will make choices, how data and information will be shared, and how disputes will be managed ( 3 ).

The team leader and project manager guide the team through this process. These roles may be combined and performed by the same individual but in some cases, especially in large teams, these may be undertaken by separate individuals. Depending on their experience and interest, the project manager may participate in the actual research project beyond team coordination. The project manager early on should provide the team with information and principles regarding the purpose and conduct of the project(s) being undertaken. The standard expectation should be established early on that each team member's voice will be heard and valued to optimize the team’s collaborative insight and output. The project manager and team leader should listen to all suggestions from team members and have the team decide together either during a virtual meeting or by follow-up individual phone calls, emails, or brief in-person meetings regarding how to establish team rules, roles, and tasks. A project manager can assist with planning and communication while ensuring that the project is completed on time ( 3 ). The project manager can also assist in securing grant funding, from an administrative, scientific, and financial perspective ( 3 ). For multi-institutional teams, data use agreements or memoranda of understanding can be put in place to help solidify ground rules for engagement among the team across organizations. It is beneficial to list the required functional roles and assign job titles at the time of project initiation ( 3 ). Speaking with other department members to identify technical or clinical specialists who have previously collaborated is also beneficial ( 3 ). Planning to include collaborators who may be required during most or all project phases will ensure team success ( 3 ). While it is possible to identify potential collaborators based on specific skill sets, the most critical factor to consider is selecting team members who exhibit positive attitudes, possess the basic skills necessary to collaborate ( 3 ), and can assist on a larger scale ( 3 ). For instance, involving a statistician during the planning phase allows for appropriate data collection from the start and avoids potential duplication of efforts in the future ( 3 ). In addition, engaging clinical administrators in the overall interdisciplinary collaboration may assist in removing administrative roadblocks in projects and grant funding applications ( 3 ). Collaborating with patients, patient advocates, or patient experience administrators also benefits team projects ( 3 ). In general, the team leader should communicate to each team member the benefits of participation and emphasize the value of the team's exposure to each collaborator ( 3 ). For researchers new to a particular institution, presenting insightful information about the project at a meeting of another department is beneficial in identifying collaborators ( 3 ). For multi-institutional teams, data use agreements or memoranda of understanding should be put in place to help solidify ground rules for engagement among the team across organizations.

3. Principles for success of interdisciplinary research teams

3.1. team building.

Due to the increasing complexity of scientific, health, and societal problems, multiple disciplines are needed to fully comprehend and develop solutions ( 40 ). It can be quite challenging to build a team that is highly efficient and cohesive. To this end, the National Research Council launched an initiative to investigate and translate the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that contribute to the effectiveness of science teams ( 21 ). To build the skills required for team effectiveness in producing and communicating scientific findings, several factors need to be evaluated. Effective interdisciplinary teams must identify specific aims and goals and choose participants in the team with appropriate skills set and attitude. Team diversity, consisting of collaborators of varying backgrounds, with scientific, technical, and stakeholder expertise increases team productivity ( 22 ). Teams may be assembled by individual scientists, institution research administrators, or funding agencies. Once the team has been assembled, it is critical to engage all participants through brainstorming ideas about the vision or goal of the project ( 3 ). During this stage of the team-building process, the roles and responsibilities of each team member are defined. Additionally, the group members' various backgrounds could lead to tension and disagreement ( 3 ). Notably, the team leader may have an initial vision for the research project, but once it is presented to the team, individual members may interpret it differently based on their prior research, clinical, or work backgrounds ( 3 ). This may take the project in a variety of directions ( 3 ). Understanding each member's vision, communication style, and preference may help in overcoming additional obstacles ( 3 ). It is critical to accept all ideas, discuss them collectively, and ultimately develop an approach to focus on a single idea or develop multiple projects on a related topic ( 3 ). For example, a team leader may initiate an idea for the group to consider, such as developing a shared decision-making aid for physicians and patients. Networking and collaborations among team members may reveal an opportunity to create a digital, patient-informed algorithm that would provide personalized results. The team leader and project manager can guide the group towards collaborative new ideas, or improvement on existing ideas, for the team to pursue. A synthesized version of the original idea would emerge after several iterative listening sessions, with opportunities for shared facilitation, brainstorming, and feedback. If the team leader were to insist on only the original idea developed in isolation, the new innovative approach would never be discovered. When everyone on the team is given the opportunity to help develop team projects and commit to seeing a shared vision through, the vision and the team become a living force ( 17 ). Clearly addressing deadlines at the start and throughout the project will help team members with project prioritization and time management. Designating tasks, establishing rules, and determining authorship norms are all important aspects in building a successful team for collaborative scientific projects ( 3 ). Addressing authorship at the outset ensures that everyone on the team is aware of the tasks that must be done in order to earn authorship ( 3 ). Team members should have appropriate access to documents being used and discussed by the team, including a list of team members with brief descriptions of their positions and roles on the team. Periodic reports on actions taken by the team and planned next steps are also helpful.

3.2. Virtual team building

Particularly in the COVID-19 pandemic, an outcome of the global impact on our academic community has been the adoption more broadly of virtual meetings. Research teams have found it essential to pivot to video conference meetings, to maintain focus and determine useful research questions that are meaningful, timely, and focused on long-term results ( 16 ). Teams serving racial and ethnic minority populations in Milwaukee WI found this to be essential, to continue collaborative team projects serving a population in which the team had already built trust ( 16 ). Teams in Milwaukee were able to adapt to available resources and channel resources towards studies that could benefit those who were structurally disadvantaged and most affected by the pandemic. Thus, utilizing virtual communication during the pandemic facilitated the continuation and advancement of community-based research that depended on uninterrupted relationships and conversations among researchers and between researchers and the community being served.

3.3. Diverse perspectives in collaboration

Working in silos may produce quick short-term achievements but hamper independent long-term success. Diverse teams comprised of individuals with different complementary expertise are comparatively successful ( 23 ). Flexibility, resilience, and innovation are enhanced by a diversity of talents, experiences, and perspectives ( 24 ). One of the benefits of working with individuals across different disciplines in the team is the availability of different perspectives and avenues to pursue to obtain the necessary research data. Involving individuals from across an institution can facilitate data gathering that may otherwise be quite challenging. This can ensure that insights from both new and existing relationships of individual stakeholders are appropriately incorporated into the steps needed for the research. For example, Stvilia et al. ( 22 ) investigated 1415 experiments carried out by several research teams at the National High Magnetic Field laboratory between 2005 and 2008. The authors observed that interdisciplinary diversity of the experimental teams was associated with higher research productivity, as measured by their volumes of publications. Personality traits of individual collaborators are equally impactful towards team success.

Establishing a secure environment that facilitates the exchange of ideas and viewpoints is important ( 24 ). Organizational strength is achieved by empowering team members to feel secure in their contributions and to thrive in their roles ( 24 ). A successful team is one in which all members are actively involved and dedicated in achieving a common objective, while also being given the opportunity to lead in their own right ( 24 ). Key elements during project discussions must include demonstrated willingness to listen deeply, speak thoughtfully, explain carefully, and be open to all perspectives. These attributes all make the team stronger and more effective ( 3 , 25 ). All team members must be made aware of how their efforts contribute to the overall team. In general, the team leader should emphasize the advantages of involvement and perspectives of all team members. Priorities should be discussed as a team, with all members giving input. The team leader or other assigned individual such as the project manager can keep track of who may not yet have had a chance to weigh in on team discussions and can ensure that no voice is lost in a meeting. Follow-up emails can also be sent to individual team members to ensure that all opinions are heard.

3.4. Team leadership

The roles of team leadership are managing task allocation to completion, team direction, and member motivation ( 26 ). Leadership is dynamic and complex, adapting to the team's structure. The leadership technique depends on the individual's leadership style and overall impacts team effectiveness ( 21 , 27 ). Under certain circumstances, an assertive, task-oriented approach may be warranted, whilst in others, leaders may seek to promote and encourage members' suggestions and perspectives ( 28 ). The executive functions of leadership in interdisciplinary research teams primarily consist of strategic planning and conceptualization, encouraging innovative perspectives and proactiveness in the team members. Leaders must be able to envisage how different disciplines might overlap in productive ways to achieve scientific advances and provide new insights to problem areas. They must comprehend the significance of such initiatives, be able to articulate their vision to possible partners, and create an environment that encourages collaboration ( 21 , 29 , 30 ). Assessing leadership competencies can be difficult; in literature, the most common indication of successful leadership has been team members' perceptions of their leader's competence, rather than direct assessments of team performance ( 21 ).

3.5. Team mentorship and sponsorship

Teams are comprised of individuals of varying disciplinary backgrounds, professional attainments and skill sets. For instance, students, ranging from undergraduates, graduate students, medical residents, and postdoctoral fellows, who are oftentimes in their formative research career years, may need mentoring by more experienced faculty researchers. In team science, mentoring is integral to the professional development of junior scientists and fosters retention of clinician scientists ( 31 ). If a senior faculty member is involved as a collaborator, this individual may serve as a valuable mentor and sponsor in identifying additional team members with whom they have previously collaborated successfully ( 3 ). Additionally, individual team members who also have their own mentors can invite their mentors to help share insights with the team. Interdisciplinary and interprofessional team mentorship has several key benefits and can help impart skills necessary to fully leverage diverse views in successful teams ( 25 ).

3.6. Modes of communication

Correspondence methods should be determined early on so that the team can reach out to each other between meetings and continue to address action items and plans without having to wait for the next large group meeting. The project manager or research program coordinator can assist with correspondence and arrange ad hoc meetings between large group sessions. In some ways, ad hoc meetings can sometimes use a co-working format, in which team members are simultaneously working on related portions of the projects and are able to synergize each other's work in real time.

Some groups have seen success subdividing time into different research areas (e.g., software development, data management, evaluation, etc.) and having specific meetings on those topics. For example, if there are three groups, then the month can be divided into one meeting per group, plus a team meeting once a month to come together and share progress. This minimizes scheduling burdens, which can sometimes be a challenge ( 25 ), while allowing all group members to stay informed and engaged.

Understanding how each team member prefers to operate, their personality and communication style, as well as each individual's preference for future feedback, may aid in overcoming additional obstacles ( 3 ). For instance, team members may have different communication preferences, with some preferring e-mail or text communication while others prefer in-person or telephone contact ( 3 ). Using web-based video conferencing applications can be advantageous for long-distance collaborations or even local collaborations where in-person meetings are prohibited or limited ( 3 ), such as during the coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Virtual-only meetings can help drive success in interdisciplinary teams. At the same time, it can be difficult to informally check in before or after virtual meetings regarding roles and contributions, while building collegial relationships with each other. Intentional email, phone, or in-person check-ins are helpful to help build team trust and solicit various perspectives from among the team.

3.7. Trust, cohesion, and human connection

In addition to communication and shared vision, trust and respect are important overarching themes of successful interprofessional collaboration ( 13 ). Relationships are at the core of effective networking and team building ( 18 ). People's time and expertise should be acknowledged, respected, and valued, with reciprocation ( 24 ). The development of trust and cohesiveness depends on establishing psychological safety ( 3 ). Psychological safety fosters successful error mitigation and learning practices without fear of retribution. Errors are objectively identified, reflected upon and appropriate solutions instituted ( 32 ). Diverse science teams benefit from psychological safety as it ensures that their interactions are not overshadowed by colleagues of higher social power ( 33 ). It is also important in large disparate teams where initial trust can be critical, which is common in multi-institutional collaborations ( 33 ). Team cohesion impacts positively on team effectiveness, which is enhanced by team interdependency of tasks and skills ( 34 ). The ultimate goal of scientific productivity cannot be achieved without cohesiveness in team science ( 3 , 35 ). The team leader can facilitate this by ensuring that each member feels comfortable sharing their preferences, acknowledging those preferences ( 3 ), and equally connecting people from different fields and generations ( 24 ). Team members from various backgrounds can be invited to weigh in on team discussions, sharing their individual perspectives informed by their own experiences and knowledge of research from their specialized disciplines. In order to achieve organizational strength, team members must feel confident in their contributions and thrive in their roles ( 18 , 24 ). Additionally, encouraging and modeling a healthy lifestyle contributes to healthy teams, team cohesiveness, and human connection ( 24 ). These methods demonstrate success as defined by how the team enriches and influences the lives of team members and others ( 24 ).

3.8. Project planning

The initial task in establishing a multidisciplinary team is to outline the scientific aims and subject areas of the collaboration ( 3 , 36 ). This will determine member characteristics and expertise during recruitment. Project planning around a specific research topic then ensues. Conducting a literature search on potential topics and developing the research question or topic using the references cited in those articles can be a useful first step ( 3 ). Reading current literature and participating in journal clubs with faculty peers may also result in new research or publication ideas ( 3 ). Additionally, this process can identify current knowledge gaps in the field, resulting in collaborative projects ( 3 ). Adaptation and flexibility are crucial as the team learns how to flow together to determine, craft, and execute projects. Once the scientific objectives and goals have been established ( 3 ), project organizational setup is important to sort out and can be a focus during budget justification discussions. Recognizing the role that each team member will play can be captured in grant applications and budgets, in addition to baseline foundational discussions when the team is being formed. The organizational setup can evolve over time, as various components of the project are tackled, and as new information is gained. As the team gleans more data and the project transforms, the organization of team members can also follow suit appropriately. In designing steps of the project, each team member should give input that leverages their skills and interests, so that the steps design for the project can be choreographed smoothly with modifications as needed. Publications by the team should include essentially all team members, with careful consideration given to placement of authorship, which often can be best established early on when the team is being built, when projects are being designed, or when data is being analyzed and interpreted. Early on, principles on which the team makes decisions should be established. Communication about reasons behind decisions should be ensured. Obstacles should be reframed as opportunities.

3.9. Team training

When team members learn skills that enable team success, interdisciplinary partnerships improve ( 37 ). Team training can take many forms and involves interventions that increase team efficiency by providing requisite knowledge and skill sets ( 38 , 39 ). Team training can take many forms. Essentially team training should focus on improving the skills, knowledge and attitudes of team members ( 21 , 40 ). Team development strategies can include workshops on evidence-based team building skills, with pre- and post-workshop questionnaires ( 37 ). Workshops tend to be highly rated, especially regarding training on psychological safety and readiness to collaborate ( 37 ). Teams that foster an environment conducive to collaboration by providing learning, team-building, and leadership development opportunities can help hone essential abilities and promote attitudes and cognitions that are predictive of success ( 13 , 37 , 41 ). Cross-training is another team training strategy, where “interpositional knowledge” is taught ( 21 ). Team members can acquire diverse skills and competencies shared by other team members, in addition to their own pre-existing skillsets ( 38 ). This fosters cohesive team interactions, shared mental models and adaptation to changing environmental situations ( 38 , 42 ). Bisbey et al. ( 33 ) lay out an evidence-based framework for team science training employing the TeamMAPPS program. The overall framework of the TeamMAPPS model involves three competency setsies. The first competency set involves awareness and is information exchange. For a science team to be effective, its members must be able to share and integrate their knowledge. As a result, scientific effectiveness relies on each member's expertise, background, and skills. This approach is particularly useful for large teams and those geographically distant and institutionally separated, since it facilitates coordination and reduces inherent differences. Second, a climate of psychological safety in teams allows members to have a shared feeling of freedom in sharing without fear of backlash. Researchers found that teams with high levels of psychological safety are more engaged and have better learning and performance results. The third competency set involves adaptation and correction. Effective science teams adapt and self-correct continually and re-examine team member skills and backgrounds. A distinguishing characteristic of the TeamMAPPS program is its versatility, with the potential to include assessment, training, and evaluation. There are learned behaviors associated with each of these sets which guide the learning program ( 33 ).

3.10. Team science models for multi-team systems

Many existing conceptual models offer insight into the complexities of implementing or evaluating traditional team-based research and very few report on multi-team systems ( 43 ). Teams are successful when teamwork (regarding relational, effective, and cognitive factors, along with psychological safety) and roles (for strategy, project management, and goal setting) are efficiently coordinated. In multi-team systems (MTS), these needs are exacerbated. Effective leadership and performance assessment structures are then required to coordinate these teams to align with the organization's aim ( 44 ). The three most reported forms of interdisciplinary research include multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary research. Transdisciplinary research integrates and extends discipline-specific methodologies to develop fundamentally new conceptual models, research hypothesis, systems, and empirical applications that supersede their disciplinary foundations, advancing innovation and scientific knowledge ( 45 ). Its appeal lies in its focus on methodologies that provide applicable solutions to problems ( 32 ).

3.11. Challenges of interdisciplinary team building

3.11.1. team diversity.

Uniqueness in perspectives and skills across team members can benefit decision-making and improve outcomes. Team member characteristics such as an individual's role or reputation, gender, or ethnicity may influence their actions and perceptions of themselves as well as other team members, which could impact efficiency and outcome ( 20 ). Individuals who share a similar profile may consider themselves part of an inner circle and may excommunicate those with dissimilar traits. Interestingly, a meta-analysis by Bell et al. investigated various operational definitions of “diversity” such as team expertise, similarities/differences among team members), and nequality in skills and experience level, and the effect of diversity on team productivity and outcomes ( 46 ). They also studied the impact of innovation, creativity, and task-related diversity on performance and reported a positive performance correlation with functional background diversity (professional expertise of members) which is a form of task related diversity.

3.11.2. Team size

Large team sizes and dispersed team members can present substantial problem for team efficiency, in terms of maintaining goal alignment, cooperation, and sustaining team objectives. Large teams may experience deviation in objectives as the team expands, with members becoming siloed and divergent in their contributions ( 33 ). This can be exacerbated for teams that are multi-institutional and in different geographical regions ( 47 ). Leaders of big teams could benefit from consulting training specialists to determine the level of “interpositional knowledge” required to facilitate team-wide behavioral alignment. Geographically dispersed team members can benfit from training to comprehend each other's skills and tasks, as well as context-driven and team-contingent competencies. Cross-training and knowledge growth may aid coordination by providing this insight ( 21 ).

3.11.3. Goal misalignment

Goal misalignment stems from team members being uninformed of shared goals, or team's practices and expectations outside the purview of team training and best practices. Awareness of the overall objective and the interconnectedness of the teams' objectives can be strengthened through reflexivity training or professional development programs ( 21 ).

3.11.4. Group faultlines

Faultlines are potential team factions based on structure (for instance, a team of two cardio-oncologists and two medical oncologists forms a possible faultline based on discipline ( 21 ). When differences in members' compositions become apparent, for instance when the team must determine how to allocate resources or tasks, faultlines are said to be “activated", as these subgroups may only support decisions that protect their interests, increasing the possibility of conflict. Conflicts arising from faultlines can be mitigated by developing superordinate team identification and goals ( 21 ). Another way to solve faultlines is by specifying task assignments across the subgroups. For instance, team members with similar skills, even across disciplines, may be grouped to work on different aspects of the projects.

3.11.5. Team funding

Pilot funds are commonly used to encourage the formation of multidisciplinary research teams ( 37 ). The American Heart Association has recently invested millions of dollars in funding for Strategically Focused Research Networks (SFRNs) formed by interdisciplinary teams dedicated to studying racial and ethnic health disparities in cardio-oncology. Furthermore, the American Heart Association has encouraged communication and relationship-building across all networks' sites (both inside and across the networks) in current and prior SFRN funding periods ( 41 ). The National Institutes of Health also funds and supports interdisciplinary research teams. Research groups should plan to obtain pilot funding together and expand their funding pool with extramural federal, society, and foundation grants.

4. Conclusion

Working in interdisciplinary multi-institutional teams can be invigorating and exciting. A variety of expertise is convened, leading to combined energy and knowledge. Complex and multifactorial topics such as chronic disease or health disparities in cardio-oncology can be identifiable and addressable in interdisciplinary research teams. Organizing and managing such interdisciplinary teams can be challenging. Developing a cohesive and highly efficient team can be difficult, and this can be a daunting task for junior faculty ( 3 ). However, effective team assembly and functioning is enabled by processes such as fluid team formation, specialized project management, and decision-making based on specific milestones ( 48 ), as well as a thoughtful approach ( 3 ) and valuing the voice of each team member. Key elements in the creation of successful interdisciplinary teams also include collective acquisition of knowledge and team project management ( 49 ). Other assets include the ability to set goals with an eye towards the future direction of the system and the ability to achieve and accomplish goals in the face of constant change ( 17 ). It is also vital to practice relationship adaptability, and to have the capacity to change course rapidly ( 17 ). The overarching team principles can be summarized as focusing on Team Building, Leadership, Discussions, Mentorship, Training, Planning, Communication and Collaboration ( Fig. 1 ). Adopting these themes and approaches can accelerate innovation and breakthroughs and generate more holistic findings that are more applicable to health interventions ( 50 , 51 ). Interdisciplinary teams can be considered to behave like a complex adaptive system of individuals ( 49 ). The actions of the individuals are interdependent and affect the system's overall performance (50, 53). When faced with challenges, the system exhibits emergent self-organized behaviors to maintain itself ( 49 ), similar to the emergence of cardio-oncology as a medical and research specialty to overcome cardiovascular challenges in cancer therapy ( 50 , 51 ). Teams demonstrating these principles, as well as adaptability and teamwork, are likely to be successful in current and future initiatives. The breadth of knowledge obtained from such collaborations can be rewarding.

Team science principles for successful interdisciplinary research teams. Templates from Infograpia were used in these graphics.

This publication was supported by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, National Institutes of Health, through Grant Numbers UL1TR001436 and KL2TR001438. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Conception and design: SAB

Drafting of the manuscript: SAB

Interpretation of data: SAB, RS, KO, JZ, JB, FC, AH, MB, JC, AK, PC, PN, RHJ, KH, LYS, BC, YCC, JO

Critical revision: SAB, KO, AH, MB, JC, AK, LYS, JO, GE, KD

Final approval of manuscript: All authors

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Driving Innovations in Biostatistics with Denise Scholtens, PhD

“I'm continually surprised by new data types. I think that we will see the emergence of a whole new kind of technology that we probably can't even envision five years from now…When I think about where the field has come over the past 20 years, it's just phenomenal.”  —  Denise Scholtens, PhD  

• Director, Northwestern University Data Analysis and Coordinating Center (NUDACC)  
• Chief of Biostatistics in the Department of Preventive Medicine  
• Professor of Preventive Medicine in the Division of Biostatistics and of Neurological Surgery  
• Member of Northwestern University Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (NUCATS)  
• Member of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center  

Episode Notes 

Since arriving at Feinberg in 2004, Scholtens has played a central role in the dramatic expansion of biostatistics at the medical school. Now the Director of NUDACC, Scholtens brings her expertise and leadership to large-scale, multicenter studies that can lead to clinical and public health practice decision-making.    

• After discovering her love of statistics as a high school math teacher, Scholtens studied bioinformatics in a PhD program before arriving at Feinberg in 2004.  
• Feinberg’s commitment to biostatistics has grown substantially in recent decades. Scholtens was only one of five biostatisticians when she arrived. Now she is part of a division with almost 50 people.  
• She says being a good biostatistician requires curiosity about other people’s work, knowing what questions to ask and tenacity to understand subtitles of so much data.   
• At NUDACC, Scholtens and her colleagues specialize in large-scale, multicenter prospective studies and clinical trials that lead to clinical or public health practice decision-making. They operate at the executive level and oversee all aspects of the study design.  
• Currently, Scholtens is involved with the launch of a large study, along with The Ohio State University, that received a $14 million grant to look at the effectiveness of aspirin in the prevention of hypertensive disorders in pregnancy.  
• Scholtens first started her work in data coordinating through the Hyperglycemia Adverse Pregnancy Outcome (HAPO) study, which looked at 25,000 pregnant individuals. This led to a continued interest in fetal and maternal health.   
• When it comes to supportive working environments, Scholtens celebrates the culture at Feinberg, and especially her division in biostatistics, for being collaborative as well as genuinely supportive of each other’s projects. She attributes this to strong leadership which established a culture with these guiding principles.   

Additional Reading  

• Read more about the ASPIRIN trial and other projects taking place at NUDACC   
• Discover a study linking mothers’ obesity-related genes to babies’ birth weight, which Scholtens worked in through the HAPO study   
• Browse all of Scholtens recent publications 

Recorded on February 21, 2024.

Continuing Medical Education Credit

Physicians who listen to this podcast may claim continuing medical education credit after listening to an episode of this program..

Target Audience

Academic/Research, Multiple specialties

Learning Objectives

At the conclusion of this activity, participants will be able to:

• Identify the research interests and initiatives of Feinberg faculty.
• Discuss new updates in clinical and translational research.

Accreditation Statement

The Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) to provide continuing medical education for physicians.

Credit Designation Statement

The Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine designates this Enduring Material for a maximum of 0.50  AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)™.  Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

American Board of Surgery Continuous Certification Program

Successful completion of this CME activity enables the learner to earn credit toward the CME requirement(s) of the American Board of Surgery’s Continuous Certification program. It is the CME activity provider's responsibility to submit learner completion information to ACCME for the purpose of granting ABS credit.

All the relevant financial relationships for these individuals have been mitigated.

Disclosure Statement

Denise Scholtens, PhD, has nothing to disclose.  Course director, Robert Rosa, MD, has nothing to disclose. Planning committee member, Erin Spain, has nothing to disclose.  FSM’s CME Leadership, Review Committee, and Staff have no relevant financial relationships with ineligible companies to disclose.

Read the Full Transcript

[00:00:00] Erin Spain, MS: This is Breakthroughs, a podcast from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. I'm Erin Spain, host of the show. Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine is home to a team of premier faculty and staff biostatisticians, who are the driving force of data analytic innovation and excellence here. Today, we are talking with Dr. Denise Scholtens, a leader in biostatistics at Northwestern, about the growing importance of the field, and how she leverages her skills to collaborate on several projects in Maternal and Fetal Health. She is the Director of the Northwestern University Data Analysis and Coordinating Center, NUDACC, and Chief of Biostatistics in the Department of Preventive Medicine, as well as Professor of Preventive Medicine and Neurological Surgery. Welcome to the show.  

[00:01:02] Denise Scholtens, PhD: Thank you so much.  

[00:01:02] Erin Spain, MS: So you have said in the past that you were drawn to this field of biostatistics because you're interested in both math and medicine, but not interested in becoming a clinician. Tell me about your path into the field and to Northwestern.  

[00:01:17] Denise Scholtens, PhD: You're right. I have always been interested in both math and medicine. I knew I did not want to be involved in clinical care. Originally, fresh out of college, I was a math major and I taught high school math for a couple of years. I really enjoyed that, loved the kids, loved the teaching parts of things. Interestingly enough, my department chair at the time assigned me to teach probability and statistics to high school seniors. I had never taken a statistics course before, so I was about a week ahead of them in our classes and found that I just really enjoyed the discipline. So as much as I loved teaching, I did decide to go ahead and invest in this particular new area that I had found and I really enjoyed. So I wanted to figure out how I could engage in the field of statistics. Decided to see, you know, exactly how studying statistics could be applied to medicine. At the time, Google was brand new. So I literally typed in the two words math and medicine to see what would come up. And the discipline of biostatistics is what Google generated. And so here I am, I applied to grad school and it's been a great fit for me.  

[00:02:23] Erin Spain, MS: Oh, that's fantastic. So you went on to get a PhD, and then you came to Northwestern in 2004. And so tell me a little bit about the field then and how it's changed so dramatically since.  

[00:02:36] Denise Scholtens, PhD: So yes, I started here at Northwestern in 2004, just a few months after I had defended my thesis. At the time there was really an emerging field of study called bioinformatics. So I wrote my thesis in the space of genomics data analysis with what at the time was a brand new technology, microarrays. This was the first way we could measure gene transcription at a high throughput level. So I did my thesis work in that space. I studied at an institution with a lot of strengths and very classical statistics. So things that we think of in biostatistics like clinical trial design, observational study analysis, things like that. So I had really classic biostatistics training and then complimented that with sort of these emerging methods with these high dimensional data types. So I came to Northwestern here and I sort of felt like I lived in two worlds. I had sort of classic biostat clinical trials, which were certainly, you know, happening here. And, that work was thriving here at Northwestern, but I had this kind of new skillset, and I just didn't quite know how to bring the two together. That was obviously a long time ago, 20 years ago. Now we think of personalized medicine and genomic indicators for treatment and, you know, there's a whole variety of omics data variations on the theme that are closely integrated with clinical and population level health research. So there's no longer any confusion for me about how those two things come together. You know, they're two disciplines that very nicely complement each other. But yeah, I think that does speak to how the field has changed, you know, these sort of classic biostatistics methods are really nicely blended with a lot of high dimensional data types. And it's been fun to be a part of that.  

[00:04:17] Erin Spain, MS: There were only a handful of folks like you at Northwestern at the time. Tell me about now and the demand for folks with your skill set.  

[00:04:26] Denise Scholtens, PhD: When I came to Northwestern, I was one of a very small handful of biostatistics faculty. There were five of us. We were not even called a division of biostatistics. We were just here as the Department of Preventive Medicine. And a lot of the work we did was really very tightly integrated with the epidemiologists here in our department and we still do a lot of that for sure. There was also some work going on with the Cancer Center here at Northwestern. But yeah, a pretty small group of us, who has sort of a selected set of collaborations. You know, I contrast that now to our current division of biostatistics where we are over 20s, pushing 25, depending on exactly how you want to count. Hoping to bring a couple of new faculty on board this calendar year. We have a staff of about 25 statistical analysts. And database managers and programmers. So you know, when I came there were five faculty members and I think two master's level staff. We are now pushing, you know, pushing 50 people in our division here so it's a really thriving group.  

[00:05:26] Erin Spain, MS: in your opinion, what makes a good biostatistician? Do you have to have a little bit of a tough skin to be in this field?  

Denise Scholtens, PhD: I do think it's a unique person who wants to be a biostatistician. There are a variety of traits that can lead to success in this space. First of all, I think it's helpful to be wildly curious about somebody else's work. To be an excellent collaborative biostatistician, you have to be able to learn the language of another discipline. So some other clinical specialty or public health application. Another trait that makes a biostatistician successful is to be able to ask the right questions about data that will be collected or already have been collected. So understanding the subtleties there, the study design components that lead to why we have the data that we have. You know, a lot of our data, you could think of it in a simple flat file, right? Like a Microsoft Excel file with rows and columns. That certainly happens a lot, but there are a lot of incredibly innovative data types out there: wearables technology, imaging data, all kinds of high dimensional data. So I think a tenacity to understand all of the subtleties of those data and to be able to ask the right questions. And then I think for a biostatistician at a medical school like ours, being able to blend those two things, so understanding what the data are and what you have to work with and what you're heading toward, but then also facilitating the translation of those analytic findings for the audience that really wants to understand them. So for the clinicians, for the patients, for participants and the population that the findings would apply to.   

Erin Spain, MS: It must feel good, though, in those situations where you are able to help uncover something to improve a study or a trial.  

[00:07:07] Denise Scholtens, PhD: It really does. This is a job that's easy to get out of bed for in the morning. There's a lot of really good things that happen here. It's exciting to know that the work we do could impact clinical practice, could impact public health practice. I think in any job, you know, you can sometimes get bogged down by the amount of work or the difficulty of the work or the back and forth with team members. There's just sort of all of the day to day grind, but to be able to take a step back and remember the actual people who are affected by our own little niche in this world. It's an incredibly helpful and motivating practice that I often keep to remember exactly why I'm doing what I'm doing and who I'm doing it for.  

[00:07:50] Erin Spain, MS: Well, and another important part of your work is that you are a leader. You are leading the center, NUDACC, that you mentioned, Northwestern University Data Analysis and Coordinating Center. Now, this has been open for about five years. Tell me about the center and why it's so crucial to the future of the field.  

[00:08:08] Denise Scholtens, PhD: We specialize at NUDACC in large scale, multicenter prospective studies. So these are the clinical trials or the observational studies that often, most conclusively, lead to clinical or public health practice decision making. We focus specifically on multicenter work. Because it requires a lot of central coordination and we've specifically built up our NUDACC capacity to handle these multi center investigations where we have a centralized database, we have centralized and streamlined data quality assurance pipelines. We can help with central team leadership and organization for large scale networks. So we have specifically focused on those areas. There's a whole lot of project management and regulatory expertise that we have to complement our data analytics strengths as well. I think my favorite part of participating in these studies is we get involved at the very beginning. We are involved in executive level planning of these studies. We oversee all components of study design. We are intimately involved in the development of the data capture systems. And in the QA of it. We do all of this work on the front end so that we get all of the fun at the end with the statistics and can analyze data that we know are scientifically sound, are well collected, and can lead to, you know, really helpful scientific conclusions.  

[00:09:33] Erin Spain, MS: Tell me about that synergy between the clinicians and the other investigators that you're working with on these projects.  

[00:09:41] Denise Scholtens, PhD: It is always exciting, often entertaining. Huge range of scientific opinion and expertise and points of view, all of which are very valid and very well informed. All of the discussion that could go into designing and launching a study, it's just phenomenally interesting and trying to navigate all of that and help bring teams to consensus in terms of what is scientifically most relevant, what's going to be most impactful, what is possible given the logistical strengths. Taking all of these well informed, valid, scientific points of view and being a part of the team that helps integrate them all toward a cohesive study design and a well executed study. That's a unique part of the challenge that we face here at NUDACC, but an incredibly rewarding one. It's also such an honor and a gift to be able to work with such a uniformly gifted set of individuals. Just the clinical researchers who devote themselves to these kinds of studies are incredibly generous, incredibly thoughtful and have such care for their patients and the individuals that they serve, that to be able to sit with them and think about the next steps for a great study is a really unique privilege.  

[00:10:51] Erin Spain, MS: How unique is a center like this at a medical school?  

[00:10:55] Denise Scholtens, PhD: It's fairly unique to have a center like this at a medical school. Most of the premier medical research institutions do have some level of data coordinating center capacity. We're certainly working toward trying to be one of the nation's best, absolutely, and build up our capacity for doing so. I'm actually currently a part of a group of data coordinating centers where it's sort of a grassroots effort right now to organize ourselves and come up with, you know, some unified statements around the gaps that we see in our work, the challenges that we face strategizing together to improve our own work and to potentially contribute to each other's work. I think maybe the early beginnings of a new professional organization for data coordinating centers. We have a meeting coming up of about, I think it's 12 to 15 different institutions, academic research institutions, specifically medical schools that have centers like ours to try to talk through our common pain points and also celebrate our common victories.  

[00:11:51] Erin Spain, MS: I want to shift gears a little bit to talk about some of your research collaborations, many of which focus on maternal and fetal health and pregnancy. You're now involved with a study with folks at the Ohio State University that received a 14 million grant looking at the effectiveness of aspirin in the prevention of hypertensive disorders in pregnancy. Tell me about this work.  

[00:12:14] Denise Scholtens, PhD: Yes, this is called the aspirin study. I suppose not a very creative name, but a very appropriate one. What we'll be doing in this study is looking at two different doses of aspirin for trying to prevent maternal hypertensive disorders of pregnancy in women who are considered at high risk for these disorders. This is a huge study. Our goal is to enroll 10,742 participants. This will take place at 11 different centers across the nation. And yes, we at NUDACC will serve as the data coordinating center here, and we are partnering with the Ohio State University who will house the clinical coordinating center. So this study is designed to look at two different doses to see which is more effective at preventing hypertensive disorders of pregnancy. So that would include gestational hypertension and preeclampsia. What's really unique about this study and the reason that it is so large is that it is specifically funded to look at what's called a heterogeneity of treatment effect. What that is is a difference in the effectiveness of aspirin in preventing maternal hypertensive disorders, according to different subgroups of women. We'll specifically have sufficient statistical power to test for differences in treatment effectiveness. And we have some high priority subgroups that we'll be looking at. One is a self-identified race. There's been a noted disparity in maternal hypertensive disorders, for individuals who self identify according to different races. And so we will be powered to see if aspirin has comparable effectiveness and hopefully even better effectiveness for the groups who really need it, to bring those rates closer to equity which is, you know, certainly something we would very strongly desire to see. We'll also be able to look at subgroups of women according to obesity, according to maternal age at pregnancy, according to the start time of aspirin when aspirin use is initiated during pregnancy. So that's why the trial is so huge. For a statistician, the statisticians out there who might be listening, this is powered on a statistical interaction term, which doesn't happen very often. So it's exciting that the trial is funded in that way.  

[00:14:27] Erin Spain, MS: Tell me a little bit more about this and how your specific skills are going to be utilized in this study.  

[00:14:32] Denise Scholtens, PhD: Well, there are three biostatistics faculty here at Northwestern involved in this. So we're definitely dividing and conquering. Right now, we're planning this study and starting to stand it up. So we're developing our statistical analysis plans. We're developing the database. We are developing our randomization modules. So this is the piece of the study where participants are randomized to which dose of aspirin they're going to receive. Because of all of the subgroups that we're planning to study, we need to make especially sure that the assignments of which dose of aspirin are balanced within and across all of those subgroups. So we're going to be using some adaptive randomization techniques to ensure that that balance is there. So there's some fun statistical and computer programming innovation that will be applied to accomplish those things. So right now, there are usually two phases of a study that are really busy for us. That's starting to study up and that's where we are. And so yes, it is very busy for us right now. And then at the end, you know, in five years or so, once recruitment is over, then we analyze all the data,  

[00:15:36] Erin Spain, MS: Are there any guidelines out there right now about the use of aspirin in pregnancy. What do you hope that this could accomplish?  

 Prescribing aspirin use for the prevention of hypertension during pregnancy is not uncommon at all. That is actually fairly routinely done, but that it's not outcomes based in terms of which dosage is most effective. So 81 milligrams versus 162 milligrams. That's what we will be evaluating. And my understanding is that clinicians prescribe whatever they think is better, and I'm sure those opinions are very well informed but there is very little outcome based evidence for this in this particular population that we'll be studying. So that would be the goal here, would be to hopefully very conclusively say, depending on the rates of the hypertensive disorders that we see in our study, which of the two doses of aspirin is more effective. Importantly, we will also be tracking any side effects of taking aspirin. And so that's also very much often a part of the evaluation of You know, taking a, taking a drug, right, is how safe is it? So we'll be tracking that very closely as well. Another unique part of this study is that we will be looking at factors that help explain aspirin adherence. So we are going to recommend that participants take their dose of aspirin daily. We don't necessarily expect that's always going to happen, so we are going to measure how much of their prescribed dose they are actually taking and then look at, you know, factors that contribute to that. So be they, you know, social determinants of health or a variety of other things that we'll investigate to try to understand aspirin adherence, and then also model the way in which that adherence could have affected outcomes.  

Erin Spain, MS: This is not the first study that you've worked on involving maternal and fetal health. Tell me about your interest in this particular area, this particular field, and some of the other work that you've done.  

[00:17:31] Denise Scholtens, PhD: So I actually first got my start in data coordinating work through the HAPO study. HAPO stands for Hyperglycemia Adverse Pregnancy Outcome. That study was started here at Northwestern before I arrived. Actually recruitment to the study occurred between 2000 and 2006. Northwestern served as the central coordinating center for that study. It was an international study of 25,000 pregnant individuals who were recruited and then outcomes were evaluated both in moms and newborns. When I was about mid career here, all the babies that were born as a part of HAPO were early teenagers. And so we conducted a follow up study on the HAPO cohort. So that's really when I got involved. It was my first introduction to being a part of a coordinating center. As I got into it, though, I saw the beauty of digging into all of these details for a huge study like this and then saw these incredible resources that were accumulated through the conduct of such a large study. So the data from the study itself is, was of course, a huge resource. But then also we have all of these different samples that sit in a biorepository, right? So like usually blood sample collection is a big part of a study like this. So all these really fun ancillary studies could spin off of the HAPO study. So we did some genomics work. We did some metabolomics work. We've integrated the two and what's called integrated omics. So, you know, my work in this space really started in the HAPO study. And I have tremendously enjoyed integrating these high dimensional data types that have come from these really rich data resources that have all, you know, resulted because of this huge multicenter longitudinal study. So I kind of accidentally fell into the space of maternal and fetal health, to be honest. But I just became phenomenally interested in it and it's been a great place.  

[00:19:24] Erin Spain, MS: Would you say that this is also a population that hasn't always been studied very much in biomedical science?  

[00:19:32] Denise Scholtens, PhD: I think that that is true, for sure. There are some unique vulnerabilities, right, for a pregnant individual and for the fetus, right, and in that situation. You know, the vast majority of what we do is really only pertaining to the pregnant participant but, you know, there are certainly fetal outcomes, newborn outcomes. And so, I think conducting research in this particular population is a unique opportunity and there are components of it that need to be treated with special care given sort of this unique phase of human development and this unique phase of life.  

[00:20:03] Erin Spain, MS: So, as data generation just really continues to explode, and technology is advancing so fast, faster than ever, where do you see this field evolving, the field of biostatistics, where do you see it going in the next five to ten years?  

[00:20:19] Denise Scholtens, PhD: That's a great question. I think all I can really tell you is that I'm continually surprised by new data types. I think that we will see an emergence of a whole new kind of technology that we probably can't even envision five years from now. And I think that the fun part about being a biostatistician is seeing what's happening and then trying to wrap your mind around the possibilities and the actual nature of the data that are collected. You know, I think back to 2004 and this whole high throughput space just felt so big. You know, we could look at gene transcription across the genome using one technology. And we could only look at one dimension of it. Right now it just seems so basic. When I think about where the field has come over the past 20 years, it's just phenomenal. I think we're seeing a similar emergence of the scale and the type of data in the imaging space and in the wearable space, with EHR data, just. You know, all these different technologies for capturing, capturing things that we just never even conceived of before. I do hope that we continue to emphasize making meaningful and translatable conclusions from these data. So actionable conclusions that can impact the way that we care for others around us. I do hope that remains a guiding principle in all that we do.  

[00:21:39] Erin Spain, MS: Why is Northwestern Medicine and Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine such a supportive environment to pursue this type of work?  

[00:21:47] Denise Scholtens, PhD: That's a wonderful question and one, honestly, that faculty candidates often ask me. When we bring faculty candidates in to visit here at Northwestern, they immediately pick up on the fact that we are a collaborative group of individuals who are for each other. Who want to see each other succeed, who are happy to share the things that we know and support each other's work, and support each other's research, and help strategize around the things that we want to accomplish. There is a strong culture here, at least in my department and in my division that I've really loved that continues to persist around really genuinely collaborating and genuinely sharing lessons learned and genuinely supporting each other as we move toward common goals. We've had some really strong, generous leadership who has helped us to get there and has helped create a culture where those are the guiding principles. In my leadership role is certainly something that I strive to maintain. Really hope that's true. I'm sure I don't do it perfectly but that's absolutely something I want to see accomplished here in the division and in NUDACC for sure.  

[00:22:50] Erin Spain, MS: Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and telling us about your path here to Northwestern and all of the exciting work that we can look forward to in the coming years.  

[00:22:59] Denise Scholtens, PhD: Thank you so much for having me. I've really enjoyed this.  

[00:23:01] Erin Spain, MS: You can listen to shows from the Northwestern Medicine Podcast Network to hear more about the latest developments in medical research, health care, and medical education. Leaders from across specialties speak to topics ranging from basic science to global health to simulation education. Learn more at feinberg. northwestern.edu/podcasts.  

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ARPA-H leaders to participate in Johns Hopkins Health Policy Forum discussion

School of medicine dean theodore deweese will lead a conversation with renee wegrzyn, director of the advanced research projects agency for health, and kimberley steele, arpa-h program manager, on april 30.

By Hub staff report

Renee Wegrzyn , director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), and Kimberley Steele , ARPA-H program manager for Health Science Futures, will join Theodore DeWeese, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, for a virtual conversation on Tuesday, April 30, as part of the Johns Hopkins Health Policy Forum .

Image caption: Renee Wegrzyn and Kimberley Steele

Established in 2022, ARPA-H advances high-potential, high-impact biomedical and health research that cannot be readily accomplished through traditional research or commercial activity.

The discussion, which begins at noon, will reflect on the agency's innovative approach to the research ecosystem, unique funding model, and the launch of ARPA-H's newest project, the Lymphatic Imaging, Genomics, and pHenotyping Technologies (LIGHT) program, which will pursue comprehensive diagnostic tools and revolutionize detection of lymphatic dysfunction.

Johns Hopkins faculty, staff, students, alumni, and members of the general public are invited to tune in to the event; advance registration is required .

"Like DARPA in the post-Spuntik era, ARPA-H today is an accelerant, and Director Wegrzyn brings expertise and a sense of urgency to funding innovation to address the greatest health care issues of our time," DeWeese said. "I am delighted to be able to bring her voice directly to the Hopkins community."

Wegrzyn was appointed by President Joe Biden on Oct. 11, 2022, as the first director of ARPA-H. Previously she served as a vice president of business development at Ginkgo Bioworks and head of innovation at Concentric by Ginkgo, where she focused on applying the tools of synthetic biology to outpace infectious diseases. Wegrzyn spent more than a decade at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), including five years as a program manager with a $250 million portfolio, and as a technical advisor to the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA).

Steele joined ARPA-H in November 2023 from The Lymphatic Education and Research Network (LE&RN), where she supported lymphatic research efforts as special projects director. Prior to that, Steele was associate professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She completed a minimally invasive and bariatric surgical fellowship at Johns Hopkins and joined the faculty, rising to associate professor while earning a doctorate in clinical investigation at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health as well as certification with the American Board of Obesity Medicine. She is recognized internationally for her contributions to research on bariatric surgery, the gut-brain axis, and neuroimaging in obesity.

This will be the 11th event in the Health Policy Forum series, which launched in fall 2020 to highlight the university's engagement with key leaders on matters of health policy and health care. Previous events featured:

• Anthony Fauci , director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (October 2020)
• Rochelle P. Walensky , director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (May 2021)
• Robert M. Davis , CEO and president of Merck (October 2021)
• Chiquita Brooks-LaSure , administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (January 2022)
• Atul Gawande , assistant administrator of the Bureau for Global Health at the U.S. Agency for International Development (April 2022)
• Donna Shalala , former HHS secretary and member of Congress (June 2022)
• Xavier Becerra , secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (December 2022)
• Michelle Lujan Grisham , governor of New Mexico (May 2023)
• Sudip Parikh , CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) (July 2023)
• Tom Polen , chairman, CEO, and president of Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD) (November 2023)

The Health Policy Forum series is jointly hosted by Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health, Carey Business School, and School of Nursing along with Johns Hopkins Medicine.

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A memo from South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem's PR team, regarding her dog murdering

We really saw this as an opportunity to grab the senseless-dog-execution demographic, and maybe even make some inroads with independent sociopaths and future serial killers..

To: South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem

From: The governor’s public relations team

Subject: Sorry about the dog-killing issue

Dear Gov. Noem:

Well, this past weekend didn’t go exactly as we had hoped, and we would like to sincerely apologize for the frequency with which you have now been called “a dog murderer.”

When we read the text of your upcoming book, specifically the part in which you describe shooting your young hunting dog Cricket in a gravel pit , it didn’t raise any red flags on our end. When you described Cricket doing all kinds of dog things like chasing chickens and generally having a blast, we thought that was relatable. And then when you wrote, “I hated that dog,” and described how you shot and killed the puppy because it wasn’t a good hunting dog, we thought: “Hmmmm, this might be a way to show the MAGA loyalists out there a different side of the governor.”

The MAGA folks love toughness, and former President Donald Trump is always saying people “ choked like a dog ” or “ lied like a dog .” It seemed this crowd would be amenable to the occasional dispatching of a puppy or two, so we viewed the anecdote in your book less as a dog execution and more as a dog-execution-ppurtunity. 

Clearly, that was not a wise strategic decision, and for that we are deeply sorry. Who knew so many Americans like dogs? Who would have imagined people on both sides of the political aisle would find it objectionable that a person would up and shoot a puppy to death rather than take the very simple steps of training the dog, taking the dog to a humane shelter or finding something other than hunting for the dog to do?

About Taylor Swift's new album: A 100% honest and also very safe review of 'The Tortured Poets Department'

We were as a surprised as you. Just a massive “Oops!” on our part.

We really saw this as an opportunity to grab the senseless-dog-execution demographic, and maybe even make some inroads with independent sociopaths and future serial killers. We just didn’t see the blowback coming .

To that end, we also apologize profusely for allowing you to share details of the goat you shot and killed , also in a gravel pit.

No governor and potential Republican vice presidential candidate should have to wake up and read the following actual words, which appeared in The Guardian :

“Noem decided to kill the unnamed goat the same way she had just killed Cricket the dog. But though she ‘dragged him to a gravel pit,’ the goat jumped as she shot and therefore survived the wound. Noem says she went back to her truck, retrieved another shell, then ‘hurried back to the gravel pit and put him down.’

“At that point, Noem writes, she realised a construction crew had watched her kill both animals. The startled workers swiftly got back to work, she writes, only for a school bus to arrive and drop off Noem’s children.

What a LOSER! Joe Biden hasn't targeted a judge's daughter or sold a single Bible.

“‘Kennedy looked around confused,’ Noem writes of her daughter, who asked: ‘Hey, where’s Cricket?’ ”

Yeah, in retrospect, we should have nixed all parts of the book dealing with the murder of animals in gravel pits. That’s on us, Governor, not you. As you know, we fully support your routine acts of animal homicide because we’re real Americans and not liberals who think there’s something “wrong” with dragging an innocent puppy to a pit and shooting it because it chased chickens.

If you want to Make America Great Again, you have to kill a few puppies, right?

We realize the fact that your upcoming book is titled “ No Going Back ” is unfortunately ironic, given that virtually everyone in America now thinks you’re a monster. And we realize that the line “I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here” coming right after the whole dog/goat murder bit in the book seems … well, not really great.

But not to worry. Today we’re going to start calling a lot of things “woke” and gin up some “antifa” sightings, which should calm things down for you.

Again, our deepest apologies for not stopping you from bragging about being a dog assassin. It won’t happen again. Because we are all quitting after today.

Your career is clearly over.

— Your loyal public relations team

Follow USA TODAY columnist Rex Huppke on X, formerly Twitter,  @RexHuppke  and Facebook  facebook.com/RexIsAJerk

How virtual work is accelerating innovation

Despite the upheaval caused by the COVID-19 pandemic—and partly because of it—innovation and digitization have been happening at a record-breaking pace. A McKinsey survey of top executives around the world found that companies accelerated their digitization  of customer, supply chain, and internal operations by an average of three years.

Indeed, over the past two years, countries around the world have set records for new business formation, new patents issued, venture capital invested, and more. The US Census Bureau’s seasonally adjusted business formation statistics data show that through 2021, a record 5.38 million applications had been filed to form new businesses—an increase of more than 50 percent over prepandemic 2019. 1 “Business Formation Statistics, April 2022,” US Census Bureau, May 11, 2022. The brisk pace meant there were roughly 409,000 more US filings in 2021 than at the same point in prepandemic 2019. The World Intellectual Property Indicators also showed that aggregate global filing activity across 150 authorities grew in 2020, even amid the global health crisis. 2 World Intellectual Property Indicators 2021 , WIPO, 2021. Venture capital flows have also boomed: in 2021, global venture capital more than doubled from 2020, rising 111 percent. 3 Jordan Major, “Global VC funding hit a record $621 billion in 2021, a 111% increase YoY,” Finbold.com (Finance in Bold), January 13, 2022.

About the authors

This article is a collaborative effort by Federico Berruti , Gisele Ho, Phil Kirschner , Alex Morris, Sophie Norman, and Erik Roth , representing views from McKinsey’s Operations, Digital, Growth & Innovation, and Real Estate practices.

What’s striking about these dramatic advances is that they largely entailed people collaborating remotely, leveraging technology in different ways, and being bolder with innovation, automation, and digitization than ever before. For decades, physical proximity has been considered essential to successful innovation. In an influential 1977 book, management professor Thomas Allen described a strong negative correlation between physical distance and frequency of communication, finding that people are four times as likely to regularly talk with someone six feet away from them as with someone 60 feet away, and people almost never communicate with colleagues on separate floors or in separate buildings. 4 Thomas J. Allen, Managing the Flow of Technology , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977.

This proximity mantra guided everything from office layouts to urban planning. Cities such as Boston (with many counterparts around the world) have tried to fuel innovation by establishing districts where academia, research organizations, start-ups, and investors work side by side in purpose-designed “innovation ecosystems.” 5 Carmelina Bevilacqua et al., Place-based innovation ecosystems: Boston-Cambridge innovation districts (USA) , Joint Research Centre, 2019. Locating problem solvers together to encourage creative collisions of ideas, experimentation, and informal collaboration is also core to one of McKinsey’s original eight essentials of innovation .

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While the pandemic-related measures have thwarted the engineered serendipity designed into physical work spaces, making watercooler conversations and impromptu problem-solving interactions difficult to replicate virtually, it has led to a broad embrace of videoconferencing and virtual collaboration tools. Organizational network and collaboration analytics have also enabled innovative companies to help employees build and sustain the ties necessary to generate new ideas. As a result, organizations have, in the words of author Steven Johnson, “widened the pool of minds that could come up with and share good ideas” 6 Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation , New York, NY: Riverhead Books, 2010. —a vital ingredient for innovation. By connecting people into broader virtual networks, the pandemic has increased the collective speed and creativity of innovation efforts.

It’s likely that flexible work and workplaces are here to stay, especially for organizations seeking to maintain or accelerate this elevated pace of innovation. More than half of corporate and government employees say they would like to work from home  at least three days per week, and the number is even higher for innovation talent, such as programmers. 7 “For programmers, remote working is becoming the norm,” Economist , August 11, 2021. Location flexibility has become a de facto expectation for the latter group. Rather than seeing this as an obstacle, organizations seeking to innovate are doubling down on the benefits that new approaches to innovation present.

Diversity and inclusion

Innovators recognize that increased diversity and greater inclusion, both within teams and at the leadership level, produce more and better innovation results. A recent McKinsey study  found that more ethnically and racially diverse companies outperform their less-diverse peers by 36 percent when it comes to financial targets. As a result, innovators  are tapping virtual work to attract more specialized and diverse talent and are building more inclusive workforces. One recently launched start-up that rapidly achieved unicorn status shifted to a virtual-first model, recognizing that the specific innovation talent its business required wasn’t available in any single major city.

Productivity

Innovators have also recognized that virtual teams, especially when managed effectively, can avoid unnecessary distractions, experience more effective and uninterrupted workflow, and achieve productivity gains. In a 2021 study, 83 percent of employees working remotely agreed that their homes enabled them to work productively—a higher proportion than the average office (64 percent) and even outstanding workplaces (78 percent). 8 “Workplace 2021: Appraising future-readiness,” Leesman, 2021. One innovative technology company recently started “time zone stacking,” the practice of strategically structuring virtual teams to positively leverage time differences and further accelerate innovation efforts.

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Customer-centricity.

Perhaps paradoxically, an adjustment made because of the COVID-19 pandemic has enabled many organizations to get physically closer to their customers, as hiring is no longer tethered to geographic location. One global payment platform, for example, launched a remote engineering hub during the pandemic, hiring engineers from a range of locations and cultures. One year into the initiative, the company reports feeling “closer to customers—because we literally are.” Similarly, a government agency now describes being more citizen-centric thanks to hiring employees who live and work across the country, not just in the capital city.

Proximity to the customer, instead of to a physical office, can help organizations’ innovation talent avoid the corporate echo chamber and identify and test new ideas faster. Getting closer to target communities is also easier than ever thanks to the proliferation of coworking sites and other “third places” to work and connect.

Proximity to the customer, instead of to a physical office, can help organizations’ innovation talent avoid the corporate echo chamber and identify and test new ideas faster.

The pandemic has made clear that lack of physical proximity need not hold back innovation—in fact, it can fuel it—but this is not a new phenomenon. Although it may come as a surprise to some, boldly innovating through remote collaboration has been a fixture in the scientific community for decades. In the 1980s, researchers adopted a way of working called the “collaboratory,” a virtual space where scientists interact with colleagues, share data and instruments, and collaborate without regard to physical location. Breakthroughs achieved through virtual collaboration include the Human Genome Project and the ATLAS project at CERN, which involved 1,800 particle physicists across 34 countries.

More recently, innovators outside the science sphere have embraced the approach. Cryptocurrencies and metaverse platforms were largely developed through decentralized collaboration involving people around the globe. Pandemic-related changes simply expanded on the model rapidly, notably in the record-breaking development of the COVID-19 vaccines and a slew of new company and product launches over the past 24 months.

If the age of assuming that innovation requires physical proximity is behind us, with innovative companies’ full embrace of virtual teams and the role of technology, what comes next? One executive who leads a 50-person innovation group as part of a 15,000-employee organization said, “The pandemic made us realize that we never needed a swanky and costly innovation studio to do our work. What we want is community.” His plans are to make virtual work permanent, with monthly or quarterly in-person gatherings to strengthen trust, friendship, and connection.

How many more innovators will adopt this approach? Will bringing together the best of remote practices and the best of in-person experiences accelerate innovation even further? Let’s start experimenting to find out.

Federico Berruti and Alex Morris are both partners in McKinsey’s Toronto office, where Gisele Ho is a senior manager; Phil Kirschner is a senior expert in the New York office, where Sophie Norman is a senior manager; and Erik Roth is a senior partner in the Stamford, Connecticut, office.

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Energy-smart bricks keep waste out of landfill

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Engineers have invented energy-efficient bricks with scrap materials, including glass, that are normally destined for landfill.

RMIT University engineers collaborated with Visy – Australia’s largest recycling company – to make bricks with a minimum of 15% waste glass and 20% combusted solid waste (ash), as substitutes for clay.

Test results indicate that using these bricks in the construction of a single-storey building could reduce household energy bills by up to 5% compared to regular bricks, due to improved insulation.

Replacing clay with waste materials in the brick production helped reduce the firing temperature by up to 20% compared with standard brick mixtures, offering potential cost savings to manufacturers. 

Team leader Associate Professor Dilan Robert said about 1.4 trillion bricks were used in construction projects globally every year.

“Business-as-usual brick production produces harmful emissions – including carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide and chlorine – and puts a serious strain on our natural resources, particularly clay,” said Dilan, from RMIT’s School of Engineering.

The team’s latest research is published in the international journal Construction and Building Materials .

Potential to make our homes and workplaces more energy efficient

The team’s research showed the new bricks have enhanced energy efficiency through improved thermal performance, and met stringent structural, durability and environmental sustainability standards. The technology has met the key compliance requirement of fired clay bricks set by Standards Australia (AS 3700).   

“Bricks play a key role in preventing energy loss from buildings,” Robert said.

“We can also produce light-weight bricks in a range of colours from white to dark red by changing our formulations.”

Dr Biplob Pramanik, the RMIT team’s environmental engineer, said the new bricks were safe to use in construction projects.

“Our bricks, manufactured from industry waste, meet state environmental regulations,” he said.

A “circular-economy solution” to a big waste challenge

In Victoria, Visy recycles glass packaging back into new bottles and jars. However, glass pieces smaller than 3mm – referred to as fines – cannot be recycled into bottles.

“We are focusing on scaling up the production process to facilitate the commercialisation of our innovative bricks in collaboration with brick manufacturers in Melbourne,” Robert said.

Paul Andrich, Innovation Project Manager at Visy, said the company was thrilled to find a solution for material that cannot be recycled into food and beverage packaging. 

“Diverting this waste into bricks with added insulation, rather than landfill, is another way we are powering the circular economy," he said.

The research team wants to collaborate with industries to explore applications of waste material in other construction products.    

Innovation supported by peer-reviewed research

The RMIT team has published peer-reviewed research on the brick innovation in several journals.

‘Utilizing rejected contaminants from the paper recycling process in fired clay brick production’ is published in Construction and Building Material s. (DOI:10.1016/j.conbuildmat.2023.134031)

‘ Energy efficiency of waste reformed fired clay bricks – from manufacturing to post application ’ is published in the journal Energy. (DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2023.128755)

‘ A viable solution for industrial waste ash: Recycling in fired clay bricks ’ is published in the Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering . (DOI: 10.1061/JMCEE7.MTENG-15165)

‘ Transformation of waste-contaminated glass dust in sustainable fired clay bricks ’ is published in Case Studies in Construction Materials . (DOI: 10.1016/j.cscm.2022.e01717 )

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Mstp leadership team visits the national museum of african american music.

Posted by fettigma on Monday, April 29, 2024 in Life in the MSTP .

by Leigh Ann Gardner (Grants Manager)

The MSTP Leadership Team visited the National Museum of African American Music (NMAAM) on Friday, April 26, as part of their ongoing education on ADI topics. The museum, located on Broadway in Nashville and free for Vanderbilt students (valid student ID required at time of admittance), focuses on both the history of African American music as well as how the experiences of African Americans shaped and influenced multiple musical genres. The tour began with a short video about the history of African American music, and the journey from being enslaved Africans in America to African Americans. NMAAM also features exhibits on different musical genres, with interactive listening opportunities as well as displays of artifacts.

The museum’s use of music and soundtracks were woven with a timeline of American history that showed how events and the varied experiences of African Americans influenced musical genres, from spirituals to ragtime to blues to hip-hop. NMAAM also highlights how African Americans, often through music, impacted the larger, mainstream culture of the United States. Exhibits in the museum showcase a broad spectrum of music history, focusing not only on performers but also African American record labels, radio stations, and venues.

During the visit, the LT learned about Vanderbilt’s partnership with NMAAM, which includes a partnership between NMAAM and the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries to support an expanded collection on books, sound recordings, and objects related to African American music. Vanderbilt has also funded internal proposals to create and enhance collaborations between NMAAM and Vanderbilt researchers.

As part of the experience, the LT also enjoyed taking the WeGo bus from campus to the museum and back. Vanderbilt students, faculty, and staff can ride the WeGo for free (VU/VUMC ID required), and the trip from campus to Broadway was an efficient and pleasant experience.

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