2023 GERMINATION Investigator Workshop

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The EFMA GERMINATION program seeks to promote the development and implementation of novel approaches, platforms, and environments for training academic researchers to formulate societally impactful research questions. This award will provide support for a two-day workshop to be held at Harvey Mudd College in early 2023, which will convene teams funded through the GERMINATION program. This event will build on past meetings by including researchers from both current and completed GERMINATION projects. The 2023 workshop, which is intended as an in-person meeting, will be preceded by a shorter virtual meeting in 2022 to initiate connection building across the GERMINATION teams. These meetings continue the goal of GERMINATION investigator workshops to propel information exchange and further community building, and in particular will explore ways to establish and support relationships beyond the lifetime of individual awards. Broader Impacts are inherent in the goals of the GERMINATION program – the development of pedagogical frameworks, platforms and/or environments that stimulate formulation of transformative research questions that address important societal needs.The 2023 workshop will bring together GERMINATION awardees and other stakeholders to report and reflect on how their projects have facilitated the formulation of transformative research questions. The planned workshop will provide a unique opportunity to prototype a culture of relational collaboration within the framework of the annual workshops. Non-traditional modes of presentation of research goals, plans, and findings will be explored, with the goal of using fun learning experiences as a mechanism to generate potentially long-term interactions among the participants from different projects. The workshop-organizing PIs have developed a set of workshop principles to guide the activities, including an emphasis on interaction, recognition of interesting and creative approaches, and identification of collaborative connections. Anticipated activities will include exploration of attributes of relational interdisciplinary collaboration, including collaborative foundations, power relationships, means of expression and approaches to risk. Ultimately, the workshop should provide a prototype for a research culture that scaffolds creative collaboration and risk taking.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.