EAGER GERMINATION Renewal: Extending a platform to germinate transformative science through diverse collaboration

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This award to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign builds on lessons learned in a previous EAGER award to extend and further assess a platform for idea generation, leveraging the productive interaction of diverse voices and perspectives. The platform is intended to increase the probability of germinating transformative research ideas that address important societal challenges. Targeted participants are late stage graduate students, early stage faculty, and postdoctoral scholars who show potential for engaging in cross-institutional interdisciplinary research linking scholars from American Indian Tribal Colleges, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-Serving Colleges and Universities, and Land Grant Universities. Two important societal impacts are anticipated. Firstly, enhancing the ability of researchers to address key national/global challenges is expected to confer both social and economic benefit. Secondly, collaboration with minority-serving institutions should increase the participation, training and professional advancement of historically underserved populations.The proposed platform uses existing knowledge on learning and ideation with the goal of fostering creativity and interdisciplinary approaches. Specifically, favorable conditions for hatching transformative research ideas include: interaction of multiple, radically different perspectives; engaging in a structured collaboration process; and working through multiple cycles of ideation, gestation and crystallization. The initial EAGER award to this group demonstrated proof-of-principle for this approach through focusing on resilience to global climate change. Under the aegis of the renewal award, two additional cohorts will be assembled focusing on distinct societal challenges (Food and Water Security; Energy Sustainability) to refine and extend this framework, and thereby test the generalizability of the approach. The research team will be composed of personnel from the American Indian Higher Education Council (AIHEC), the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU), the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education (NAFEO), and from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). A repeated measures design will enable collection of multiple behavioral metrics. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of dynamics across groups will explore the framework's capacity to identify, codify, and execute creative ideas. Anticipated project outcomes are: (1) creative idea generation; (2) sustainable cross-institutional and interdisciplinary networks to promote future research addressing scientific grand challenges; (3) a refined procedure for facilitating the first two outcomes; and (4) evidence of efficacy and scalability. The inclusion of minority-serving institutions in a way that gives them true voice breaks new ground in this area of inquiry. Bringing together scholars from multiple groups with substantively different sociocultural backgrounds will allow evaluation of the hypothesized benefit for transformational thinking relative to socially homogenous teams.