5. Community and Collaboration Fosters Effective Team Science
Without the Team Science course, jumping headfirst into a big project
would have been overwhelming and isolating. AIMS’ Team Science class
established a community amongst trainees despite physical and
disciplinary boundaries. Improving collective communication skills
enabled trainees to collaborate across disciplines on ecological issues
like identifying drivers of water quality and quantity. The class
empowered trainees to become more involved in the AIMS project as we’ve
learned to confidently articulate ideas and effectively incorporate
feedback. These skills helped trainees navigate intense, cross-regional
sampling efforts, as well as sustain engagement through virtual
collaborations, such as our metabolism focus group. In addition, taking
time for a deeper discussion of the proposal allowed trainees to
understand the logistics and management involved in running a big
project, which is an essential skill to build in modern scientific
careers.
The community AIMS trainees built in the Team Science course continued
after the class; the student Slack space remains an active resource for
skill sharing among peers, and trainees meet monthly for coffee-talk
about the project and graduate school. The class helped trainees get to
know each other and the project goals, thereby enabling us to make
valued contributions to the project, and to reach across regions and
disciplines to collaborate with other trainees. This is demonstrated by
25 cross-region student-led authorship memos on diverse topics such as
partitioning baseflow sources in non-perennial streams, quantifying
stream metabolism, examining biogeochemical response to storm events,
and developing an open-source software package for flow intermittency
loggers.
While this cohort-based, project-specific Team Science class is one
model for student training, we also recognize that other models and
interventions exist for incorporating Team Science training into student
development. For example, the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis
Center (SESYNC) builds team science training into the Graduate Pursuit
program (Wallen et al. 2019). Learning modules, activities, and
competencies have been developed and can be incorporated into project
workshops and team building activities (Pennington et al. 2020, Gosselin
et al. 2020). Key tools for those seeking to embark on Team Science
training include the NRC report (National Research Council 2015), the
NIH Field Guide to Collaboration (Bennett et al. 2018), training
workshops available through societies such as the American Institute of
Biological Sciences (AIBS), and the NSF-supported Toolbox Dialogue
Initiative (https://tdi.msu.edu/).
We recommend that big, collaborative projects begin with formal Team
Science courses for trainees, which benefits student advancement,
enhances the productivity of the project, and accelerates the discovery
of solutions to ecological issues. The positive impacts of the Team
Science course were seen from new team members to established
investigators. Team Science provided coordinated onboarding, which
ensured we understood our role on the project and empowered us to
explore our own hypotheses early on, accelerating the pace of our
research. As a result, we returned to our lab groups with enhanced
training for supportive lab culture, helping PIs build and maintain
effective research lab groups of their own. Additionally, project-wide
collaboration was cultivated by demystifying the authorship policies and
expectations associated with the project from the start, enabling us to
participate in publishing materials with interdisciplinary teams. We
summarized the main features of our Team Science course, as well as the
advantages, challenges, and key resources in Table 1 as well as in
several of our course and project documents (Supplemental Info 1-5).
Early relationship building translated into a unified sense of team
identity, which has been integral to the AIMS’ success in launching as a
large, collaborative project. Our goal in documenting our experiences
and providing our resources is to make it easier for other big,
interdisciplinary teams to use this as a scaffolding to build their own
Team Science onboarding programs incorporating trainees to large,
interdisciplinary projects.