SciTS 2010 Conference: Panels

Strategies for Facilitating Team Science

Panelists in this session will share resources and describe tools to support team science in practice. Michael Conlon is PI of the ARRA funded VIVO Consortium on research networking and will describe how the VIVO networking tool can be used to establish and facilitate team science collaboration. Kara Hall will introduce an online “Team Science Toolkit” developed by her team at the NIH National Cancer Institute. The Toolkit will create a dynamic community-driven repository of resources to support the practice and study of team science. Gary Olson will present a new web-based tool that distills expertise drawn from his long experience of facilitating team science; the Collaboration Success Wizard can be used by researchers at various stages in the team science process to glean feedback and advice. Bonnie Spring will introduce a series of web learning modules that she and her colleagues are developing; the first module introduces a wide audience to team science core concepts, incentives and challenges, team assembly and management skills, and evaluation. Finally, Robert Taylor will discuss institutionally-supported IT and cyberinfrastructure used to enhance collaboration in distributed scientific teams.

  • Bonnie Spring, Ph.D., Professor, Preventive Medicine and Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
  • Gary Olson, Ph.D., Professor of Information and Computer Sciences
  • Kara Hall, Ph.D., National Institute of Health, National Cancer Institute, Program Officer, Behavioral Research Program
  • Michael Conlon, Ph.D., University of Florida, Associate CIO for IT Architecture, Director of Biomedical Informatics in the UF College of Medicine, Associate Director of Clinical and Translational Science Institute
  • Robert Taylor, Ph.D., Northwestern University, Director of Academic Technologies
  • Question and Answer Session

Panelists

Bonnie Spring
Bonnie Spring

Bonnie Spring, Ph.D., earned her doctorate degree in psychology from Harvard University and is Professor of Preventive Medicine, Psychology, and Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Director of Behavioral Medicine, and Co-Program Leader in Cancer Prevention at Northwestern University. She is the Immediate Past President of the Society of Behavioral Medicine (SBM) and recipient of SBM’s Distinguished Research Mentor award. She is also a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, member of the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, and holds the American Board of Professional Psychology's Diplomate in Clinical Health Psychology. She is an advisory editor for the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Journal of Clinical Psychology in Medical Settings, and Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, founding editor for Translational Behavioral Medicine: Practice, Policy, Research, and serves on grant review panels for the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Dr. Spring’s research career has been defined by a proclivity for posing questions whose answers require a multidisciplinary, team science approach. For example, she initiated and Chairs the NIH-funded Council for Evidence-Based Behavioral Practice (EBBP), whose members are experts in medicine, psychology, nursing, public health, nursing, and library sciences. The EBBP Council’s mission is to create training resources and tools that help bridge the gap between research and behavioral health practice at the individual and population levels. Funded continuously since 1976, her research intervening on behavioral risk factors (smoking, poor quality diet, physical inactivity, obesity) brings together collaborators in behavioral science, medicine, nutrition, kinesiology, engineering, economics, and social networks science. Within RTS, Dr. Spring is developing a series of online learning resources to help researchers conduct better team science. The learning modules will convey background knowledge about the science of team science, and will feature lessons learned from the experiences of successful basic, clinical and behavioral science research teams.

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Gary M. Olson
Gary M. Olson

Gary M. Olson, Ph.D., is Donald Bren Professor of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He joined the Department of Informatics at the Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences in July of 2008. Previously he was Paul M. Fitts Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Information and Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. He received his B.A. summa cum laude (1967) in Psychology from the University of Minnesota, and an M.A. (1968) and Ph.D. (1970) in Psychology from Stanford University. For more than two decades he has conducted research in the areas of human-computer interaction (HCI) and computer supported cooperative work (CSCW). Of late the focus of his work has been on how to support small groups of people working on difficult intellectual tasks, particularly when the members of the group are geographically distributed. This research has involved both field studies of groups attempting to do such work and lab studies that evaluate specific technologies. He has published more than a hundred and twenty articles and chapters, and has edited four books, most recently Scientific Research on the Internet published in 2008 by MIT Press. In 2003 he was elected to the ACM SIGCHI Academy, and in 2006 shared the SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award with Judy Olson. In 2008 he was elected a Fellow of the ACM, and in 2009 became a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) and the American Psychological Association (APA).

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Kara L. Hall
Kara L. Hall

Kara L. Hall, Ph.D. is a health scientist in the Office of the Associate Director of the Behavioral Research Program in the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences (DCCPS) at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) working in the areas of behavioral science, dissemination and implementation science and the science of team science. During her career, Dr. Hall has participated in a variety of interdisciplinary clinical and research endeavors. Her research has focused on the development of behavioral science methodologies such as the design of survey protocols, meta-analytic techniques for health behavior theory testing, as well as on applications of health behavior theory to multiple content areas and the development of computerized tailored interventions to foster health promotion and disease prevention behaviors. Additionally, Dr. Hall leads the DCCPS science of team science team, focused on advancing the field by developing new metrics, measures and models for understanding and evaluating transdisciplinary research, collaboration and training - specifically in the context of large research initiatives. Dr. Hall served as a co-chair for the 2006 conference “The Science of Team Science: Assessing the Value of Transdisciplinary Research” and co-editor for the recent American Journal of Preventive Medicine Special Supplement on the Science of Team Science. Dr. Hall earned her Masters and Ph.D. in Psychology at the University of Rhode Island.

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Michael Conlon
Michael Conlon

Michael Conlon, Ph.D. is Associate CIO for IT Architecture, Director of Biomedical Informatics in the UF College of Medicine, Associate Director of the university’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute, and Principal Investigator for VIVO: Enabling National Networking of Scientists. His responsibilities include development of academic biomedical informatics, expansion and integration of research and clinical information resources as well as strategic planning for university information resources. Previously Dr. Conlon served as Chief Information Officer of the University of Florida Health Science Center where he directed network and video services, desktop support, media and graphics, application development, teaching support, strategic planning and distance learning. He earned his Ph.D. degree in Statistics from the University of Florida, undergraduate degrees in Mathematics and Economics from Bucknell University, and is the author of over 150 scholarly publications and presentations. His current interests include enterprise change and organizational issues in the adoption of information technology, large scale data systems integration and enterprise architecture.

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Robert Taylor
Robert Taylor

Robert Taylor, Ph.D. arrived at Northwestern in December 1991 to found the Instructional Technology Group and to help shape Northwestern's efforts in Smart Classroom development. His focus here has been on moving academic technologies beyond the "early pioneers" stage and into the mainstream of most faculty members' work in the classroom and in research.

Bob worked at the University of Rochester Computing Center from 1982 until 1991. He left there as an Assistant Director of the Center and was in charge of faculty services, the development of relations with the supercomputing center at Cornell, and the creation of new teaching labs.

Previously, Bob worked as a research associate in the Community Biology Group at the University of Michigan and owned an award-winning old house restoration finishing business in upstate New York. Bob has a BA in Mathematics.

Question and Answer Session

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