EAGER: Integrated Team Science Curriculum Development & Support for the Convergence Accelerator Program

This project will support the development and delivery of a novel team science curriculum for the Convergence Accelerator program.

The Convergence Accelerator is a new effort at NSF to accelerate use-inspired convergence research in areas of national importance. The most vexing challenges require collaborative melding of expertise from different disciplines and partnership among different kinds of organizations – convergence! Essential to the Convergence Accelerator’s approach is a tailored curriculum provided to grantee teams.

A crucial part of that curriculum is “Team Science.” The goal of the team science elements of the curriculum is to facilitate convergence team development and effectiveness. The funded teams are all highly interdisciplinary and incorporate expertise from different types of organizations, but in order to be effective in their projects – and truly convergent – grantee teams need to communicate and collaborate effectively and rapidly.

Because Phase I Convergence Accelerator awards are only 9 months in duration, it is particularly important that teams build their communication and collaboration skills rapidly.

This project expands upon previous successful NSF-supported work by the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative (TDI) that has resulted in TDI’s professional development tools that have been used at more than 350 workshops around the world since 2005 to help researchers enhance their capacity for collaboration within cross-disciplinary teams. It also builds upon an effective train-the-trainer workshop provided to the first cohort of Convergence Accelerator grantees.

The project will extend the Toolbox Dialogue effort to create an even more comprehensive Team Science communication and collaboration curriculum. The project will facilitate development of a training effort that integrates “social-relational” as well as “cognitive-epistemic” dimensions of collaboration. The project will do this by coordinating team science curricular offerings with two other experts.

The project will result in new knowledge about and methods for facilitating productive collaborative environments that is likely to foster project innovation.

The broader impacts of this project include increasing the effectiveness of Convergence Accelerator grantee teams. By helping the teams that participate in the curriculum to rapidly identify and resolve differences, those teams will be more able to develop translational research products that positively impact the American people. The project will also develop online resources such as videos and webinars which can then be adapted to share with teams beyond the Convergence Accelerator program.

Further outcomes are expected to include generalizable knowledge that will inform effective professional development in team science and convergence research broadly.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.