EAGER International Type II: Inclusiveness and Diversity as Building Blocks of Resilient International Research Teams in the Age of COVID-19

最近的新冠肺炎相关事件严重扰乱了许多国际团队，特别是那些专注于发展中国家基础和应用研究的团队。 处于各个发展阶段的协作团队都会受到影响，包括长期存在的团队、最近成立的团队和正在形成的团队。 虽然临时过渡到在线视频会议使基本通信能够继续作为权宜之计，但在建立适应性强、适应性强和创新的研究团队以应对后COVID的未来方面仍然存在重大知识差距。 传统上，国际研究团队的建立是基于满足资金优先事项的效率，过去的联盟，沟通的便利性和机构文化的相似性。这些团队可能没有包容性和多样性，只是达到了供资优先事项所要求的竞争力的表面水平。 我们假设，国际研究团队可以被设计成更具弹性，包容性和多样性是建立弹性团队的关键考虑因素。 我们建议研究三个跨学科研究小组的典范，他们都在非洲从事复杂的社会生态问题，包括粮食安全、土地利用规划和生态系统服务。 (1)大型、成功、完善的团队，（2）最近成立的团队（2020财年）在第一年因COVID相关限制而中断，及（3）新团队试图在COVID后，即边境关闭和病毒热点的“新常态”下组建。 团队弹性将使用半定量（根据Linkov等人，2013）和定量（网络科学）方法。 弹性矩阵方法集成了多标准决策分析（MCDA），以整合不同来源的定量和定性信息，这些信息涉及不同协作活动领域（物理，网络和社交）的弹性响应/恢复/适应阶段的团队弹性。 网络科学方法将代表团队在相同域中的连接性，而不是使用聚合指标，因为网络通过链接和节点互连。 这些相互连接的网络将通过链路和节点连接中断或功能恢复、效率和适应能力下降进行压力测试。 随后，团队设计和连接结构将比较与团队绩效相关的紧急质量。我们的目标是量化几个研究团队的弹性，并评估包容性和多样性如何导致更好的研究成果沿着恢复和适应COVID-19危机。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Recent COVID-related events have significantly disrupted many international teams, especially those focused on basic and applied research in developing countries. Collaborative groups at all stages of development are impacted, including long-standing teams, recently established teams, and groups in the making. While impromptu transitions to online, video conferencing have allowed basic communications to continue as a stopgap measure, significant knowledge gaps remain in building resilient, adaptive and innovative research teams into the post-COVID future. Traditionally, international research teams have been built based on efficiency in satisfying funding priorities, past alliances, ease of communication and similarity of institutional culture. Such teams may not be inclusive and diverse beyond a superficial level required to be competitive by funding priorities. We hypothesize that international research teams can be designed to be more resilient and that inclusiveness and diversity are key considerations in building resilient teams. We propose to study three exemplars of trans-disciplinary research groups, all working in Africa on complex socio-ecological issues ranging from food security, land use planning and ecosystem services. (1) Large, successful, well-established teams, (2) Recently established teams (FY 2020) disrupted in their first year with COVID-related limitations and (3) New teams attempting to form in the post-COVID, “new normal” of closed borders and virus hotspots. Team resilience will be quantified using semi-quantitative (Resilience Matrix after Linkov et al., 2013) and quantitative (Network Science) approaches. The Resilience Matrix approach integrates multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) to integrate disparate sources of quantitative and qualitative information regarding team resilience in Respond/Recover/Adapt phases of resilience across different domains of collaborative activities (physical, cyber and social). Instead of utilizing aggregated metrics, a network science approach would represent team connectivity across the same domains as networks interconnected by links and nodes. These interconnected networks will be stress-tested through disruption of link and node connectivity or degradation of functional recovery, efficiency and adaptation capacities. Subsequently, team designs and connection structures will be compared for emergent qualities related to team performance. Our goal is to quantify resilience in several research teams and assess how the inclusiveness and diversity results in better research outcomes along with recovery and adaptation to the COVID-19 crisis.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.