Collaborative Research: Enabling SBE Science via the Network for Transformative Research

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This project supports an ongoing collaborative effort between Jackson State University (JSU), The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, and the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities to implement the Network for Transformative Research (NTR) as a model to generate multi-institutional, transdisciplinary research collaborations that address emergent societal challenges. The NTR builds on the research team’s prior success nucleating diverse teams and enabling them to secure federal funding to address SBE relevant research challenges. The NTR will provide participants with intellectual resources and training to negotiate the barriers known to inhibit diverse, inter-institutional scientific collaboration. The NTR has potential to germinate transformation by: (1) Providing opportunities for early career researchers at minority-serving institutions (MSIs) and smaller institutions to form diverse research teams, (2) Facilitating the capacity of institutions with limited infrastructure to develop and sustain research programs, (3) Harnessing the problem-solving potential of teams that are diverse across multiple dimensions, and (4) Implementing an agile mechanism for generating research driven by institutions serving communities often most affected by societal challenges. The NTR will engage in three primary activities, managed by JSU: (1) Recruiting scientists from network institutions to participate in cohorts through the germination process developed in prior work involving collaboration between JSU and UIUC, (2) Fostering institutional capacity development by engaging administrators across participating institutions, (3) Instituting ongoing evaluation of NTR activities to improve processes and to develop generalizable practices for the broader research community. The initial cohort for the NTR will include faculty selected from universities located throughout Mississippi, to ensure representation from MSIs, small, non-research-focused rural institutions, and research-intensive universities. The proposed project supports the recruitment and management of two cohorts of researchers who will develop interdisciplinary research projects centering on: (1) Food insecurity, and (2) Natural Disaster Resilience. Each of these topics has been identified by participating institutions as an area of dire attention to the communities constituting the state of Mississippi.The NTR will refine sustainable methods for accelerating the development of social, behavioral and economic research capacity at MSIs. The project extends a previously developed scalable model for broadening participation in science by bringing resource-challenged institutions into the broader research landscape and expanding collaborative networks and capacity within and among participating institutions. The model involves a comprehensive set of interventions (whose designs are grounded in research findings from the Science of Team Science, Communication Studies, and Organization Studies) that includes formation of diverse scientific teams, facilitated project management, and fostering of a collaborative culture at both research-intensive institutions and institutions having limited research infrastructure. The model being employed incorporates elements of collaborative problem-solving, distributed research coordination and adaptive systems theory to generate a comprehensive approach to research capacity-building that is both scalable and sustainable. Researchers at UIUC will use mixed-methods evaluations (including surveys, qualitative interviews, and field observations) to analyze participants’ experiences and to develop tested and scalable methods to overcome systemic barriers to the creation of diverse, successful research teams. The project also included support for external evaluators to assess the NTR’s programs.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.