Conference Workshops

The conference committee has put together an impressive set of workshops for our community. These are devised as a service for our varied stakeholders in order to enhance the professional development and evolution of the science of team science.  As with last year’s conference, workshops are offered as part of your conference registration and will be held on the first day of the conference.

Title: Enhancing Team Science Effectiveness through Team Training

Lead Facilitator: Maritza Salazar, University of California, Irvine

Co-facilitators:  Wendy Bedwell, University of South Florida; Deborah DiazGranados, Virginia Commonwealth University; Theresa Lant, Pace University; Gaetano R. Lotrecchiano, George Washington University; Kevin Wooten, University of Houston

Description: Although interdisciplinary scientific collaboration has many success stories, evidence suggests that, in many cases, teams do not always achieve the goal of successfully integrating knowledge. To improve the ability of interdisciplinary teams to generate novel solutions to complex problems, effective teamwork and team training has been identified as a critical means to enhance performance. Drawing on decades of research on team training, this workshop will present participants with evidence-based approaches to the design, development, and implementation of successful team training programs.

Title:  Collaborative Technologies: Facilitating How we Conduct Research Together

Lead Facilitator:  Ryan Watkins, George Washington University

Co-facilitators: Anne Marino, National Academy of Sciences; Megan Potterbusch, National Digital Stewardship Resident (Open Science Framework)

Description:  This workshop is devised to discuss the wide variety of technologies used to facilitate collaborative team science. Whether you are working in the same building, or collaborating with researchers around the world, today’s research teams can benefit from numerous technologies.  In this workshop we review how to effectively use the varied features of these technologies that support team science.

Title: Improvisation for Leadership and Critical Communication with sideCoach

Lead Facilitator:  Boyd Branch, Arizona State University

Description: This workshop is devised to help train future leaders to utilize performance and improvisation tools to develop personal, dynamic, data driven techniques to build consensus, encourage excellence in teammates, and make outcome independent requests of stakeholders.

Title: Self-Identifying the Knowledge, Skills, and Dispositional Attributes that Define the Intereach Community

Lead Facilitator:  Christine Ogilvie Hendren, Duke University

Co-Facilitators:  Gabriele Bammer, Australian National University; Holly Falk-Krzesinski, Elsevier

Description:  This workshop addresses a new but growing SciTS-generated community of practice and research: Intereach (Interdisciplinary Integration Research Careers Hub). The Intereach community has evolved around a broadly shared need for new types of roles to be defined, recognized, institutionally supported and trained in order to optimize the success of interdisciplinary scientific endeavors. We will cover the new forms of expertise needed to address complex problems and effectively engage diverse knowledge bases and work at the interfaces between disciplines to help facilitate, optimize, and translate, research outcomes.

Title: Network Perspectives to Understand and Enable Team Science 

Lead Facilitator: Noshir Contractor, Northwestern University

Description: In this workshop, attendees will be introduced to the basics of social network theories, methods, and tools.   They will come away with an improved understanding of the various forms of networks necessary for effective scientific collaborations.  This workshop is organized into three distinct parts.  (1) The first part provides an historical overview of the motivations to view team science from a social networks perspective. This first part will conclude with a brief introduction to the concepts of social networks, cognitive social networks, knowledge networks, cognitive knowledge networks and their relevance to team science. (2) The second part focuses on using network metrics to describe team science.  This part begins by defining various concepts used in network analysis: actors and attributes of actors, relations and properties of relations as well as two-mode networks. Next it describes various how these concepts influence strategies for the collection of network data. The session then defines and describes how various common network metrics are computed and interpreted at the actor, dyadic, triadic, sub-group, and component level. (3) The third part of the workshop addresses using network models to understand and enable team science. Here, a multi-theoretical multilevel (MTML) model is outlined to help stakeholders understand the dynamics for creating, maintaining, dissolving, and reconstituting social and knowledge networks in scientific communities. The session will provide a high level overview of statistical techniques to test MTML models of team science. Research exemplars are presented to illustrate the potential of the MTML framework to understand and enable team science. The session concludes with a demonstration of how these insights are being used to develop recommender systems for assembling effective scientific teams.

Title: Taking the Pulse of the Science of Team Science (SciTS) with the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative (TDI)

Lead Facilitator: Stephanie E. Vasko, AgBioResearch, Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University

Co-Facilitator: Stephen Crowley, Department of Philosophy, Boise State University

Description: The Toolbox Dialogue Initiative (TDI, formerly the “Toolbox Project”) is a philosophically-grounded, dialogue-based approach to enhancing communication and collaboration within teams and communities.  For this year’s SciTS conference, TDI is aiming to support community-wide reflection by the SciTS community on aspects of the science of team science. Following an introduction to the TDI method and its use in the SciTS community the workshop will utilize an instrument tailored to allow participants to directly create knowledge based on interdisciplinary dialogue.