Community Building and Team Science Support for the Global Centers Program

Addressing complex global issues requires innovative and synergistic partnerships across sectors, disciplines, and geo-political boundaries to advance science, technology, and policy. The complex endeavor of collaborative, international, large-scale, interdisciplinary research requires coordinated support and an adaptive approach to meet the varied needs of the project teams. The Toolbox Dialogue Initiative Center, based at Michigan State University, supports awardees of the NSF Global Centers (GC) Program in this endeavor. It provides coordinated team science training to build team cohesion and momentum in the early stage of their projects. This project supports GC awardees in thinking strategically about communication within their centers and in managing the processes required for interdisciplinary, convergent research. This three-year project aims to support Track 1 and Track 2 awardees of the NSF GC Program by building team science capacity within each project as well as community across projects. The two main elements of this project are: 1) annual, in-person, community-building meetings, and 2) virtual interactive seminars and workshops. The annual community-building meetings brings together GC awardees in Tracks 1 and 2 to support resource sharing and knowledge building around best practices for use-inspired research and education, multi-stakeholder engagement, and workforce development in the context of international, interdisciplinary, collaborative research. The virtual interactive sessions serve the needs and interests of the GC awardees as they design and sustain their global research centers; they provide opportunities for continuous learning and knowledge exchange between the annual meetings, and leverages relationships among investigators across cohorts. These interactive sessions also provide an opportunity for each team to strengthen its communicative and collaborative capacity through participation in a Toolbox dialogue-based workshop. Together these elements provide investigators with opportunities to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of interdisciplinary, international, research collaborations. 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.