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Our Publications

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How does your team make decisions? Do you vote? Does the loudest voice usually win? Does everyone on the team generally feel heard? Does your team have a charter to provide guidance? Or maybe there is often just silence and the team assumes agreement?

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Scientists are increasingly charged with solving complex societal, health, and environmental problems. These systemic problems require teams of expert scientists to tackle research questions through collaboration, coordination, creation of shared terminology, and complex social and intellectual processes. Despite the essential need for such interdisciplinary inter-actions, little research has examined the impact of scientific team support measures like training, facilitation, team building, and expertise. The literature is clear that solving complex problems requires more than contributory expertise, expertise required to contribute to afield or discipline. It also requires interactional expertise, socialised knowledge that includes socialisation into the practices of an expert group. These forms of expertise are often tacit and therefore difficult to access, and studies about how they are intertwined are nearly non-existent. Most of the published work in this area utilises archival data analysis, not individual team behaviour and assessment. This study addresses the call of numerous studies to use mixed-methods and social network analysis to investigate scientific team formation and success. This longitudinal case-based study evaluates the following question: How are scientific productivity, advice, and mentoring networks intertwined on a successful inter-disciplinary scientific team? This study used applied social network surveys, participant observation, focus groups, interviews, and historical social network data to assess this specific team and assessed processes and practices to train new scientists over a 15-year period. Four major implications arose from our analysis: (1) interactional expertise and contributory expertise are intertwined in the process of scientific discovery; (2) team size and inter-disciplinary knowledge effectively and efficiently train early career scientists; (3) integration of teaching/training, research/discovery, and extension/engagement enhances outcomes; and, (4) interdisciplinary scientific progress benefits significantly when interpersonal relationships among scientists from diverse disciplines are formed. This case-based study increases understanding of the development and processes of an exemplary team and pro-vides valuable insights about interactions that enhance scientific expertise to train inter-disciplinary scientists.

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High Impact-Practices (HIPs) have been found to improve student engagement and retention, increase civic engagement, and enhance learning outcomes. Research on HIPs shows that combining multiple HIPs into a course, also known as hybrid HIPs, are more impactful than individual HIPs, and that community engagement and service-learning pedagogies are especially impactful when combined with other HIPs. The purpose of this study was to assess whether different levels of hybrid HIP combinations produced similar or different outcomes for students, as assessed by reciprocal learning. The courses included in this study were a study abroad course and two comparison courses within one department, which employed different levels of hybrid HIPs, such as collaborative assignments, service-learning, reflections, active learning, and project-based learning. Social Network Analysis (SNA) was used to evaluate three types of social ties (communication, social support, and learning) in these three courses. The results show that careful design and integration of multiple HIPs in the study abroad course produced markedly denser and more integrated communication and social support networks than the other courses. In addition, the study abroad class developed a learning network with high levels of reciprocal learning. This study contributes to the field of higher education in two ways: (a) expands the evidence-base for the robust learning outcomes produced by hybrid HIPs and (b) demonstrates that HIPs have to be planned within courses. Finally, integrating high-level learning objectives and pedagogies, regardless of whether or not the course type is considered as a HIP, will enable the ‘gold standard’ to be applied to all the different course types.

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Select Presentations

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Team Science Awards

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Science of Team Science (SciTS) Poster Presentation Award, Science of Team Science Conference, Lansing, MI.  “Successful process evaluation provides insight into team development and goal attainment: The science of team science”

Science of Team Science (SciTS) Meritorious Contribution Award for Emerging Scholar Poster Presentation, Science of Team Science Conference, Galveston, TX. “The Central Role of Women in the Development Process and Outcomes of Scientific Teams.”

Social Change Scholarship, Colorado State University. “How the Engagement of Scientific Interdisciplinary Teams Creates Social Change.” 

Highest achievement in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Graduate Student Symposium, Colorado State University. “Including Graduate Students in Interdisciplinary Research.”

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