Sponsored by the Team Expertise and Management Support (TEAMS) Resource

Why is Team Science so hard? The impact of academic culture on interdisciplinary collaboration

Speaker: Betsy Rolland, PhD, Associate Director, Team Science at Sage Bionetworks

About: Previous work by the National Academies identified 7 key challenges of conducting team science. In this talk, I will propose one more: the fundamental nature of academic culture in the US. Top research universities and funders encourage, sometimes require, researchers to engage in collaborative science, but the very nature of academic culture presents roadblocks that research teams struggle to overcome.

Without substantial investment in infrastructure to support and facilitate team science, faculty and staff are left trying to navigate between the ideal of team science that requires collaboration, psychological safety, and diversity of thought and the reality of academic culture that often runs on competition, fear, and rigid hierarchies.