Although interdisciplinary research teams are challenging to assemble and maintain, there is increasing evidence that disruptive scientific inquiry emerges from these configurations. This project creates a novel research facilitator that enhances the productivity and extends the reach of interdisciplinary research teams devoted to studying distinctive features of complex living systems—agency, cognition, development, function, and goal-directedness—across spatial and temporal scales.
A research and administrative team at the University of Minnesota will host a consortium consisting of individual and institutional members to achieve four goals: capacity building of conceptual, theoretical, and empirical resources to foster new research configurations and strategies; community formation and sustenance to nurture a growing group of scholars pursuing these themes through a variety of methods; synergy across research projects and disciplinary approaches to connect researchers who are unaware of or unknown to others working on these ideas; visibility, to raise the profile of these researchers and their projects to a wider audience, both within and outside academia.
The mechanisms to achieve these goals are: consortium organized activities, such as interdisciplinary workshops, communication and dissemination (newsletters, podcasts), and open access publication support; research scaffolding in the form of manuscript and proposal review services, networking opportunities, professional development for junior scholars, and semester-in-residence fellowships for book authoring; a diverse microgrant structure involving cross-training opportunities and essay contests for early career researchers, pilot awards for data collection with new methods or computational approaches, writing “hunkers” to develop new grant proposals, “hot topic” workshops to formulate white-papers that stimulate new research, and an experimental funding exchange leveraging consortium member participation.
