Learning to conduct "Team science" through interdisciplinary engineering research

Today's science and engineering graduate students will likely work in collaborative settings and interdisciplinary teams in their future careers. The solutions to the greatest scientific global challenges rest on the productivity and success of diverse teams of specialists working together. Recent work has begun to explore the optimization of collaborative interdisciplinary efforts, paying attention to factors such as interpersonal dynamics and teaming. This emerging field has been dubbed "Science of Team Science" and has been studied mainly in professional research settings. This exploratory study seeks to understand how graduate students learn to conduct team science across institutions and disciplines. Participants consisted of graduate students that differed in a variety of characteristics, including time in their graduate program, focus within materials science engineering, and level of experience with independent laboratory research. Senior graduate students were responsible for facilitating an interdisciplinary research project and delegating research work tasks to teams of other students. We present findings from a mixed methods study which evaluates individual and team successes in collaborative multi-institutional and interdisciplinary research. Implications of this work include helping programs develop competencies for their graduate students that include "team science" and collaborative skills.