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.