Continuing Professional Development for Team Science

Although current funding announcements increasingly call for research that involves collaboration across several scholarly disciplines, many senior scientists were trained in an era when team-based cross-disciplinary collaboration was uncommon and even discouraged. The need for team science professional development opportunities that cross disciplinary backgrounds and experience levels is great, but the resources available to provide such training are few. Having previously created teamscience.net, a suite of free interactive online learning modules about team science, we illustrate how the modules were paired with an in-person workshop to facilitate the launch of a newly funded, interdisciplinary, highly geographically distributed team. The Mobile Big Data to Knowledge (MD2K) study is a Big Data Center of Excellence funded by the National Institutes of Health to develop and study the use of novel wearable sensors to prevent two adverse health events: relapse to smoking among recently quit smokers, and re-hospitalization among recently discharged heart failure patients. Team-based learning principles were applied to facilitate cross-talk among the 68 health professionals and computer scientists from 11 institutions who attended the first annual MD2K all-hands meeting. This chapter includes the protocol, timeline, and workshop materials and provides observations about implementing the training. We suggest that team science training is feasible and valued by scientists from different academic backgrounds who are trying to conduct cross-disciplinary research. We also propose a need for training resources that are tailored to meet the changing professional development needs of teams as they evolve from team assembly, through team launch, to maturation.