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.
April 12th: Taking STEPS Toward Convergence Research Success: Sharing a plan and inviting community wisdom
Click here to view the April 12 2022 INTEREACH webinar, where Drs. Christine Ogilvie Hendren, Gail Jones, and Anna-Maria Marshall introduce Convergence Research efforts within STEPS (Science and TEchnologies for Phosphorus Sustainability), an NSF Science and Technology Center funded in October of 2021. STEPS is a convergence research community of diverse researchers who address the complex challenges in phosphorus sustainability - at once a limited, critical nutrient and a harmful, overabundant pollutant - by integrating disciplinary contributions across the physical, life, social, and economic sciences. During the multiple years that led up to the funding of this 9-university, 30+ investigator Center with as many self-identified disciplinary backgrounds, project leaders intentionally included Team Science and convergence expertise within the team, and welcomed evidence-based methods for collaboration and convergence into the fabric of the planning and the culture. Examples include the incorporation of named Boundary Objects, collaboration planning best practices, group commitment to epistemic humility, interdependence, and knowledge co-creation. This team of STEPS investigators shares Center approaches, plans to research themselves in real time, and most importantly, welcomes insight and feedback from the INTEREACH community.
March 8th: Bridging User Experience and Team Science
Click here to view the Mar 8th INTEREACH webinar led by Dr. Stephanie Vasko, Senior UX Researcher with MESH Research, and Managing Director for the Center for Interdisciplinarity at Michigan State University. In this interactive session, Dr. Vasko presented an introduction to user experience design (UXD) & user experience research (UXR) and to key topics in these fields. We discussed how team science practitioners and researchers can integrate UXR and UXD both into their work and into growing their own web presence. As a way to illuminate the inherent commonalities in boundary-spanning work and UXD/UXR, Dr. Vasko also presented some information about her own UX career path and offered ways that UX is an exciting career option for members of the INTEREACH community.
February 8th: The Art & Science of Adjourning
Click here to view the Feb 8th INTEREACH webinar, the final installment of the Series: The Art & Science of Making Meaningful Moments – Subtle Strategies & Creative Conditions for Effective and Uplifting Facilitation. Hosts Anne Heberger Marino, Founder of Lean-To Collaborations, Hannah Love, Co-Founder of Team Divergent Science, & Alyssa Stephens, Founder of Cactus Consulting join us again to close out this series with some tips for making your meeting closures as “satisfying as a chocolate chip cookie”. Just as chocolate chip cookies can vary greatly based on the ingredients used, adjournment tactics will vary based on the nature of the meeting or retreat. They share 4 key elements to consider when deciding on your specific adjournment strategy: purpose of closure/reflection (including observing, learning, evaluating integrating), depth of reflection, format of reflection, and time available. The hosts then demonstrate 3 interactive adjournment strategies for 1) a quick closure that highlights participant learning, 2) a more in-depth closure for longer meetings and retreats where more reflection is required, and finally 3) ensuring follow-through and generating action items for after the meeting has ended.
January 11th: The Art & Science of Changing Organizational Culture
Click here to view the January 11th INTEREACH webinar, the sixth installment of the Series: The Art & Science of Making Meaningful Moments – Subtle Strategies & Creative Conditions for Effective and Uplifting Facilitation. Hosts Drs Ellen Fisher, Vice President for Research at University of New Mexico, and Ellyn Dickmann, Researcher/Consultant, Dickmann and Associates, LLC lead a highly interactive session addressing why organizational change is so hard, especially in our current cultural context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The presenters focused on alignment of definitions of organizational culture, the specific context of organizational culture in higher education institutions, stages of organizational change, and some telltale signs of when a culture is no longer working. They end by covering 15 strategies to engage as a facilitator of cultural change, with specific examples that our presenters have used in their own organizations. This webinar is great for those looking to learn more about leading and facilitating organizational culture change within their own organization. You can access a pdf version of this slides at this link.
December 14th: Creating Conditions for Compassionate & Resilient Community Work
Click here to view the December 14th INTEREACH webinar, the fifth installment of the Fall Series: The Art & Science of Making Meaningful Moments – Subtle Strategies & Creative Conditions for Effective and Uplifting Facilitation. In this webinar, Courtney Ngai returns (prev. Series Introduction, see “Aug 13”, below) along with series co-host Alyssa Stephens, Founder of Cactus Consulting, to focus specifically on collaborations between academics and community groups, and why, if not facilitated equitably, these types of interactions may result in “missed connections”, such as those see in the craigslist days of old. They argue that in order for these types of collaborations to be compassionate and resilient, 1) they must recognize the power of combining community expertise with scientific knowledge, 2) honor the skills and strengths of each group, 3) understand the needs and capacity of each group, and 4) work towards goals that benefit all parties. They discuss strategies and facilitation tools for building equitable relationships from the group up and baking in best practices throughout the relationship.