Presenter: Kevin Weinfurt, PhD - Professor and Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Population Health Sciences in the Duke University School of Medicine.

Abstract: There is growing appreciation for the benefits of team science. To reap the benefits of a multidisciplinary team, it is important to understand the factors that can interfere with productive team-based work. Factors that have been studied include the formation, composition, and geographic dispersion of teams; institutional and organizational supports for team science; communication processes; goal alignment; trust; and use of shared models. In this talk I will discuss a factor that is often missing from discussions about team science, which I call intellectual personality. This refers to a person’s preferences for certain ways of thinking and for particular signs that let them know that their thinking has been successful. I will borrow from American psychologist and philosopher William James to describe three different types of intellectual personalities and discuss strategies for managing groups that contain extreme versions of these types.