SGER: Further Exploration Multidisciplinary Collaboration

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The KDI initiative was a two-year innovative program whose goal was to foster multidisciplinary research across the directorates at NSF. A KDI PI workshop, online survey and archival analysis were used to examine what happened in those projects three to four years after the fact. A majority of KDI projects were geographically dispersed, multidisciplinary, and comparatively large (average of 4 principal investigators). More dispersed projects incurred significantly higher coordination costs and were also associated with PIs reporting fewer positive outcomes. However, before making recommendations to NSF and to researchers about the appropriate coordination infrastructure needed in dispersed projects, additional analyses need to be performed and alternate explanations ruled out. Finer grained measures will be computed from zip codes and fields of specialization. Descriptive statistics from unfunded projects need to be examined to better understand how funded projects differ on features like dispersion and multidisciplinarity. One timely objective is to help clarify which questions NSF should ask when evaluating innovative, multi-disciplinary research programs.