Video series shares team science, multidisciplinary grant collaboration insights

A culture of multidisciplinary collaboration and teamwork is growing at the University at Buffalo, and so, too, are the stories of successful grant submissions that have resulted from this emphasis on team science. To highlight this cross-disciplinary team approach to proposal development and offer guidance to researchers and research teams, the University at Buffalo Clinical and Translational Science (CTSI) Workforce Development Core is sharing a series of interviews with veteran UB investigators.

The ongoing series, titled “Behind the Proposal: Team Science and the Power of Cross-disciplinary Grant Collaboration,” is designed to gain unique insights from investigators who have productive and successful experience working in large interdisciplinary teams.

“From many discussions with trainees and established investigators over the years, we discovered that researchers often have misconceptions about teams and teamwork in research and academia — including that team members have to agree on everything, or have similar backgrounds — and these fallacies prevent them from applying teamwork effectively to their research,” says CTSI Workforce Development Core Director Ekaterina Noyes, PhD, MPH, Associate Dean for Translational and Team Science, School of Public Health and Health Professions. “We thought that by sharing experiences of real research teams we could help our audience to better understand the benefits of teamwork and recognize situations in their life where a team approach may have an advantage.”

In the first video in the series, which is now available to watch here (via the CTSI YouTube page), Noyes discusses the impact of team science and collaboration with Jennifer Read, PhD, SUNY Distinguished Professor, Chair, Department of Psychology, College of Arts and Sciences. During the 20-minute interview, Read outlines her experience building and working with a team, and describes how she brought together a group of administrators to assist her team with grant submissions.

Read explores the value of strategic team building, and how these choices can influence the team dynamic: “Sometimes the very strength someone is bringing is so important to the success of the project, but you may also need someone to counter those strengths in a way that might smooth things out or provide a different perspective. That is always the fun and the challenge, I think, of building a team.”

Read offers the following tips for investigators:

• Ask, during the formation process, “What are the skills that we need and who do we know who can do that?”
• Be honest about the challenges involved and the difficulties in successful grant applications, so the team is comprised of individuals who “want to do something different and exciting, stretch themselves a bit, and build some collaborations.”
• Keep track of your timeline so all team members have a “sense of the bigger picture” and understand what’s next.

As Noyes explains, “Grant submissions of course are the central element of every researcher’s career, but the team champions we interviewed shared many other important lessons that I hope the viewers will recognize and find useful. How can we diagnose and resolve conflict in teams without derailing the teamwork? How do we decide whom to invite to the team to maximize output? How can we create culture of trust, openness, and respect in highly diverse hierarchical teams?”

Additional videos in the series feature interviews with CTSI Dissemination and Implementation Science Core Director Ranjit Singh, MB BChir, MBA, Associate Professor, Vice Chair for Research, Director, Primary Care Research Institute, Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, and Gregory G. Homish, PhD, Chair, Professor, Department of Community Health and Health Behavior, School of Public Health and Health Professions.

“We looked to principal investigators who had a history of successful teamwork in different settings and different fields to help our viewers to see situations that they can identify with and from which they can learn,” Noyes adds.

In Singh’s interview, he describes the formation of Team Alice, a research, education, and advocacy program with a goal to educate older adults about the dangers of overmedication and empower them to actively participate with their healthcare providers in making medication decisions. Team Alice was inspired by the story of Alice Brennan and the efforts of her daughter, Mary Brennan-Taylor, to drive positive change among healthcare professionals and across the system.

“We made a deliberate effort to first work to understand the problem from [Mary Brennan-Taylor’s] perspective and then to start to contemplate how we would approach it,” Singh explains. “We realized quickly that we needed other disciplines to be included.”

Singh says determining the roles for members of the team was important for the success of the project.

“There were times when there might have been ambiguity across the whole team in terms of what the roles were,” he says. “We did make it clear at the beginning that the people from the research side were leading the team and that our community partners, mostly Mary Brennan-Taylor and her husband, were driving it from a community perspective to make sure that we stayed on focus in terms of our mission.”

In the Homish interview, he outlines why he is a “passionate believer in team science” and points to a T32 training program at UB as a prime example.

“This is a training program funded by the National Institutes of Health continuously for the last 25 years, looking at training the next generation of alcohol researchers,” he explains. “In order to do that, we use multiple units and multiple departments within UB, including the School of Public Health and Health Professions, the Jacobs School, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Social Work. We are bringing together a lot of different disciplines.”

Homish says the team has evolved over time to involve many departments and to include predoctoral trainees in the last five years. This, Homish says, allows for greater innovation.

“Looking across disciplines really allows us to think about different methods,” he states. “Something that might be standard in one field might be completely different in another field.”

When reflecting on the series, Noyes says it is important that viewers keep in mind that “teamwork is a skill, not a personality trait. So, like with any skill, practice makes perfect, and working with an experienced coach or mentor who could provide thoughtful, contractive feedback is even better for improving your teamwork skills like communication, coordination, and leadership. What is so great about teams is that team members could provide feedback to each other, to create this organic self-correcting system, and share the benefits of being a part of an effective team.”

Watch the CTSI newsletter, Translational Spotlight, for news on additional videos in the “Behind the Proposal: Team Science and the Power of Cross-disciplinary Grant Collaboration” series in the future.