Community Engagement and Team Science

The MARG (Multidisciplinary Advocates and Research Group) works specifically to foster community engagement projects. Attendees are a mix of community-engaged researchers and community member advocates. This group meets monthly to host presentations that intentionally focus on the relationship of researchers with external partners to implement translational research. Meet and Greets with community & external partners happen quarterly to establish/strengthen relationships with community partners.

If you are interesting in learning more about the MARG please contact Cherayla Haynes.

Similar to the way research benefits from the different perspectives of researchers, patients, and community members, diverse perspectives among researchers are also highly valuable. Research shows that teams that include members from different scientific disciplines have greater productivity and scientific impact. Our goal is to enhance both the formation and functioning of multidisciplinary collaborations to accelerate impactful research for underserved/excluded populations. We are engaged in an ongoing process of assessing the most important Team Science needs of our community of scientists and providing targeted initiatives and resources to address those needs. A Team Science Advisory Board open to all members of our research community provides input to our Team Science Steering Committee to guide our process (contact the Team Science navigator Drew Fox if you would like to learn more). Our current resources include team science competency workshops for teams and Collaboration Planning, a 90-min facilitated session designed to help teams work through a variety of practical issues to help prevent future conflict. Workshop topics address competencies such as building genuine relationships; team communication; collaborative problem-solving and creativity; team leadership and management; justice, equity, and inclusion. To learn more about Collaboration Planning, scroll down. To begin the process of scheduling a Collaboration Planning session, use our intake form.

What is Collaboration Planning? Frontiers is now offering UW-ICTR’s 90-minute collaboration planning session for research teams (and especially pilot teams) that engages your team to think through the ways you will work together, proactively addressing the areas that most frequently cause conflict in teams, including authorship, communications, and project management. Originally designed by team science experts at the NIH and NSF drawing upon decades of research on teams and collaboration, a collaboration plan may be useful in the following ways:

• To help your team create strong team processes from the beginning, which has been shown to result in improved scientific outcomes

• As a template for writing a multi-PI plan

• To address team-science-specific review criteria in future grant applications

• Skill-building for research staff and early-stage investigators in team leadership and collaboration

Here is a link for a short (7-minute) video explaining collaboration planning and its potential benefits to you and your team.

What will happen during Collaboration Planning? In this 90-minute session with your team Dr. Drew Fox from the Frontiers Team Science Function will lead you through a guided exercise to craft a plan specific to your project addressing key challenges of team science. The end result of this session will be a short, 1-2 page Collaboration Plan.

Collaboration Planning was specifically designed for translational, cross-disciplinary, pilot research teams to help them launch projects quickly and efficiently and make the most of a short-term pilot award. However, it is suitable for research teams of almost any kind, including well-established teams that want to learn to work better together or teams with community partners.

If you're interested in starting the process to get a session booked, please fill out our Intake Form. If you have any questions or would like further discussion about whether Collaboration Planning is right for your research team, please email Team Science Navigator Drew Fox (dtfox@cmh.edu).

The guided exercise that constitutes Collaboration Planning is divided into 7 sections, each addressing a specific aspect of Team Science. The seven sections are:

1. Team Vision

Example Q: What is the overarching research question or problem you’d like to answer/solve with this particular project?

2. People, Roles, & Responsibilities

Example Q: Who is on this team and what skill set do they contribute to achieving your team’s shared goals for this project?

3. Team Outputs

Example Q: What will your authorship or attribution policies be?

4. Team Culture

Example Q: What are some of your team norms and expectations?

5. Team Processes & Team Functioning

Example Q: How can your team assess if it is functioning well?

6. Project Management & Infrastructure

Example Q: How often will your team meet and by what modality (in-person, Zoom, MS Teams, WebEx, phone)?

7. Implementation & Maintenance of the Collaboration Plan

Example Q: How can you build in reflection time at each milestone to assess your team processes and your alignment with the Collaboration Plan?

Click here to view the full worksheet.