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

最近与COVID相关的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。所有开发阶段的协作团队都会受到影响，包括长期团队、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，但在建立适应能力强、适应能力强和创新的研究团队以适应新的艾滋病后的未来方面，仍然存在重大的知识差距。传统上，国际研究团队的建立是基于满足资金优先事项、过去的联盟、沟通的便利性和机构文化的相似性方面的效率。这样的团队可能不是包容性和多样性的，超出了通过资助优先事项而具有竞争力所需的表面水平。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范例，它们都在非洲从事从粮食安全、土地利用规划和生态系统服务等复杂的社会生态问题的工作。(1)大型、成功、成熟的团队，(2)最近成立的团队(2020财年)在第一年因COVID相关限制而中断，(3)试图在后COVID、封闭边界和病毒热点的“新常态”中形成的新团队。团队复原力将使用半定量(Linkov等人，2013年后的复原力矩阵)和定量(网络科学)方法进行量化。弹性矩阵方法集成了多标准决策分析(MCDA)，以在跨不同领域的协作活动(物理、网络和社交)的弹性的响应/恢复/适应阶段集成关于团队弹性的不同的定量和定性信息源。与使用聚合指标不同，网络科学方法将代表通过链路和节点互连的网络在相同域中的团队连接性。这些相互连接的网络将通过中断链路和节点连接或降低功能恢复、效率和适应能力来进行压力测试。随后，将对团队设计和连接结构进行比较，以确定与团队绩效相关的新品质。我们的目标是量化几个研究团队的复原力，并评估包容性和多样性如何带来更好的研究成果以及对新冠肺炎危机的恢复和适应。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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.