Click HERE to view the third installment of the series “I want to be a professional Arrow when I grow up: Pathways and opportunities for a new workforce," in which panelists Gemma Jiang, Senior Team Scientist for the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRISS) at Colorado State University; Marisa Rinkus, Associate Director of the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative (TDI) Center at Michigan State University; Stephanie E. Vasko, Senior User Experience Researcher in the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State University; and Kristine Glauber, Senior Research Program Leader for the Clinical and Translational Science Institute at Duke University describe their roles as Arrows in academia occupying non-tenure track positions. The panelists share the career trajectories that led them to their current roles and discuss how these roles - all of which explicitly function to enable effective transdisciplinary team-based research - came into being at their respective institutions.
October 10th, 2023: Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S) as "the arrow"
Click HERE to view our October 10th, 2023 webinar exploring what would it mean if the emerging integration profession fostered by INTEREACH was based on an academic discipline or field. The session starts with a short pre-recorded talk by Gabriele Bammer, Professor of Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S) at The Australian National University, who describes i2S as such a discipline. The pre-recorded talk is followed by reactions from two panelists, both of whom use i2S to describe what they do. Christine Hendren, Interim Vice Provost for Research & Innovation, Director of the Research Institute for Environment, Energy, & Economics, and Professor in the Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences at Appalachian State University and Bethany Laursen, Team Science Specialist at the University of Michigan and Principal Consultant at Laursen Evaluation & Design, LLC provide their perspectives and how they have used i2S in “being the arrow” and developing their careers. This is the second webinar in the series, “I want to be a professional Arrow when I grow up”: Pathways and opportunities for a new workforce.”
September 12th, 2023: Taking stock of our growing community of practice
Click HERE to view the September 12th, 2023 webinar hosted by the INTEREACH Leadership Team: Christine Ogilvie Hendren, Professor of Geological and Environmental Sciences and Director of the Research Institute for Environment, Energy, and Economics (RIEEE) at Appalachian State University; Kristine Glauber, Senior Research Program Leader for the Team Science Core of the Duke University Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI); and Amalia Turner, Training and Education Coordinator for the Team Science Core of the Duke CTSI. In this kick-off to the fall webinar series, “‘I want to be a professional Arrow when I grow up’: Pathways and opportunities for a new workforce,” the INTEREACH Leadership Team re-visited the motivation behind forming this community of practice and examined how the community has grown and changed over time. INTEREACH members were invited to connect with one other in small groups and capture thoughts about the value and the future of INTEREACH in interactive Jamboards.
May 9th, 2023: Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research Through Vertically-Integrated Teams
Click HERE to view the May 9th, 2023 webinar presented by Laura Howes, MBA, Director of Bass Connections at Duke University, and Dr. Ed Balleisen, Professor of History and Public Policy and the Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University. This session describes how Duke University’s Bass Connections program provides opportunities for students from all fields and levels to work collaboratively with faculty on applied research projects. Each year since it’s 2013 launch, the program features more than 60 year-long research teams which include more than 1,000 undergraduates, graduate students and faculty participants. Most teams also include external partners. In this webinar, Ed and Laura share lessons learned about the challenges and best practices for facilitating interdisciplinary research teams, in particular focusing on the benefits of vertically-integrated teams, and what they have learned about setting such teams up for success.
April 11th, 2023: Useful Strategies for Engaging Researchers with Industry: Boundary Spanning Efforts
Click HERE to view the April 11th, 2023 webinar presented by Jeffrey T. Agnoli of The Ohio State University, Senior Liaison Strategic Partnerships, Ohio Innovation Exchange. In this session, Jeff discusses his approach in managing the role and function of the Ohio Innovation Exchange for the Ohio Department of Higher Education. This multi-university platform facilitates higher education and industry partnerships for a growing collection of Ohio’s universities. His current focus is on building a sustainable future for this research expertise and analytics platform, and the discussion explored how to engage with industry partners in research, commercialization, workforce development, and strategic partnerships.
March 14th, 2023: Spanning multiple government agencies and nations in building transdisciplinary research
Click HERE to view the March 14th, 2023 webinar presented by Dr. Quinn Spadola, Deputy Director of the U.S. National Nanotechnology Coordination Office. In this session, Dr. Spadola draws upon her diverse background including a Ph.D. in Physics and MFA in Science and Natural History Filmmaking to share how she views nanotechnology as a powerful tool to engage and excite future STEM professionals, as well as to bring together agency representatives, academics, and members of industry to tackle challenges such as climate change and pandemic preparedness. Her discussion touches on themes of power as a convening leader in the absence of either authority or funding ability, and on how to help foster a shared vision and understanding across multiple intellectual languages. She explores how the alignment of motivations and shared threads of creativity around a platform research area such as nanotechnology can be harnessed to inspire and advance innovation.
January 10th, 2023: Surfacing and spanning boundaries: Perspectives from history of science
Click HERE to view the January 10th, 2023 webinar presented by Evan Hepler-Smith, Assistant Professor in the Duke University Department of History. Dr. Hepler-Smith specializes in the history of chemical sciences and industries, the history of information sciences, and methodological studies of chemistry in the social sciences. Through this lens he presents here how the field of history of science takes the boundaries defining disciplines, expertise, and research specializations as its stock in trade. How have disciplines come into being? How do they change? What has knowledge-making looked like without them? Who did the work, and who got the credit? How have diverse specialists (experimenters, theorists, modelers, and instrument-makers, for instance) managed to find a common language sufficient for successful collaboration? How have scientists shaped and been shaped by the broader societies around them? How have they shaped and been shaped by social worlds within their institutions and disciplines? In this webinar, I introduce a few of my favorite insights about research collaboration from the work of fellow historians of science, with examples of how I have made use of these ideas in my own research and teaching.
November 8th: Research Development Professionals Stepping Outside Institutional Habit Boundaries
Click here to view the Nov 8th INTEREACH webinar, with Melanie Bauer, research development professional at Nova Southeastern University in South Florida. Research Development (RD) professionals support faculty in their grant seeking and other research-related endeavors. However, they are a largely untapped group of intellectual leaders capable of authoring large grants to develop research-enhancing programs, connect with state/national initiatives, and advance team science thereby elevating the role RD plays in furthering research, translation, and economic goals. RD professionals are also prime recipients of the outputs of the field of team science, though these findings need support to translate into the workplace. Melanie describes in this webinar how as RD professionals ourselves, her team broke outside their typical roles as grant proposal supporters to be grant leaders ourselves, winning as PI and Co-PIs a major federal grant. What resulted was a test of what happens when we step outside the roles we typically play at our institutions and in our profession in order to serve as boundary spanners connecting with and translating information from various stakeholder groups. In the near term her team aims to improve interdisciplinary research collaborations and redefine what’s possible in RD, and in the long term to be part of the solution to addressing major societal challenges.
October 11th: Spanning Boundaries, Creating Sparks and Reimagining the Future of Research Universities
Click here to view the Oct 11th INTEREACH webinar, with Dr. Pips Veazey, Director of the UMaine Portland Gateway. This webinar explores boundary spanning in the specific context of the challenge to leverage regional and state possibilities and partnerships to maximize impact and reimagine the future of research universities. Dr. Veazey frames the discussion around the idea that many of us have served on large interdisciplinary research teams as facilitators, leaders, brokers and integrators. We synthesize information, refine tools and develop new approaches to enhance the effectiveness of these teams that are composed of people in pursuit of new disciplines, new ways of organizing information and new ways of seeing the world. What if we were asked to expand our frame of reference from an interdisciplinary research team to a statewide university system? How do we capitalize on team science leadership and management expertise to enhance the effectiveness of a university system? How might we as team science experts envision the future of higher education? This webinar includes an interactive discussion exploring the power of our collective experiences to change the future of higher education and the relationship between traditional university research systems and the communities in which they reside.
May 10th: Ideas and techniques for using team time effectively in convergence research teams
Click here to view the May 10th INTEREACH webinar in which we hear from Dr Gemma Jiang on the importance of intentional use of team time. For this webinar, Dr Jiang was inspired by Andrew Carnegie’s book “The Gospel of Wealth”. Here, Dr Jiang equates “Team Time = Team Wealth”, and advocates for the use of Adaptive Spaces to create conscious, collective team time that will ‘give energy’ to the team. She explains that Adaptive Spaces are ways of coming together that plays with the dominant structure, processes, and culture that are ever present and often invisible in the traditional academic research environment. She then provides examples of Adaptive Spaces, offers some observations, and philosophical musings from her perspective as the facilitator of Adaptive Spaces.