4. What Trainees Learned from AIMS Team Science
Team science allowed the cohort to develop psychological safety, which ultimately enabled effective team functionality within the larger AIMS project. Psychological safety is the shared belief that the team is a safe space for risk taking and exchanging new scientific ideas (Edmondson 1999). This is especially important for trainees and early career researchers, who often face underdeveloped confidence and general inexperience, making it more difficult to participate in large projects with unfamiliar collaborators. Developing psychological safety early on allowed AIMS trainees to freely share ideas by establishing trust among team members. Our Team Science class provided a safe space to gain confidence, get to know each other, and receive feedback from peers. This resulted in increased feelings of being supported by, connected to, and included in the project team (Figure 2). Additionally, the incorporated DEI training [provided by the ADVANCEGeo Network] educated and empowered team members in building inclusive workspaces. Ultimately, a focus on fostering psychological safety and trust among trainees fostered collaboration across the AIMS project.
Onboarding via the Team Science class enabled AIMS trainees to understand how a big project operates and adjust to new expectations. The practical operation of a big, interdisciplinary project poses challenges for trainees to navigate due to differences in disciplinary jargon, best practices, and acknowledged goals. Furthermore, the challenges of managing personal interactions, competing agendas, and demands on time increase as a function of team size. To address these challenges, the Team Science class discussed the AIMS project’s logistics and policies (e.g., Supplemental Info 3-5), thereby building a common vocabulary and understanding of project-wide goals. Further, this allowed trainees to advance their knowledge base beyond specific sub-disciplines. This course introduced trainees to each other despite disciplinary and institutional barriers, facilitating effective communication and building a sense of community. Discussions of project expectations were provided to the group at the same time and in the same format, leaving less room for misinterpretation or miscommunication.
The course launched early and open conversations about authorship, data sharing, and workload distribution. Notably, AIMS trainees valued discussing the authorship policy (Supplemental Info 4-5; modeled on policy described in Cheruvelil et al. 2014), as it gave a clear outline of what was expected from project members as co-authors on papers and talks. AIMS’ internally posted authorship memos (Supplemental Info 5) allowed other collaborators to express interest in co-authorship and determine non-advisors’ roles on our papers. Thirty-seven authorship memos have been written so far to further a variety of products and manuscripts, both within and across the regions and institutions in AIMS (Figure 1). Examples include Mountain West and Southeast regions’ microbial ecologists working with Great Plains hydrologists to describe microbial diversity in the Konza Prairie (Figure 1). Hydrology collaborators across all regions are building a R package for processing flow intermittence sensor data (Figure 1). A subset of biogeochemists across all regions are focused on stream metabolism (Figure 1). By demystifying the authorship process early on, trainees were empowered to lead 68% of all products so far, allowing us to share our findings and build strong networks early in our careers. Additionally, the AIMS Mentorship Agreement (Supplemental Info 3) provided similar guidance across labs and institutions by facilitating discussions between faculty mentors and trainees of mutual expectations. These discussions led to clarity and transparency in trainees’ relationships with advisors and other project mentors, while also providing a foundation for continuing the conversations after the class was over. Overall, setting these expectations early allowed us to understand our role more clearly on a big project with many competing demands.
Collaboration requires building skills in effective group communication including integrating layers of feedback, building awareness of disciplinary jargon, and navigating misunderstandings before they become conflicts. To practice these skills, trainees received in-class feedback on our conceptual models from AIMS peers, thereby building confidence before presenting to more experienced researchers. By the time trainees reached the high-stakes environment of a full-project meeting, the ideas had been vetted by our peers, mentors, supervisor, and course instructor. Iterative feedback improved trainee’s individual conceptual models (Panel 1) and gave us the opportunity to collaborate across disciplines, allowing us to begin our thesis and dissertation work with many levels of interdisciplinary feedback within our first semester. Additionally, it is inevitable that conflicts will arise when many distinct disciplines and personalities are represented on big projects; however, Team Science provided a scaffolding to navigate points of friction. This ensured that conflicts did not turn into outright disputes, but instead led to greater understanding between collaborators. For AIMS, a focus on building group communication and conflict management skills allowed us to more confidently navigate the challenges inherent in working with an interdisciplinary team.