The Center for Biomedical Ethics offers a Team Science Consultation service through Spectrum

The Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics (SCBE) now offers a Team Science Consultation Service through Spectrum. This program builds on SCBE’s nationally recognized Benchside Ethics Consultation Service, which has served the Stanford Medicine community for over a decade. The Team Science Consultation Service will bring together experienced translational experts in a broad range of disciplines across campus to discuss challenges in team science and collaboration for investigators who seek this service.

The Team Science Consultation service is led by Dr. Meghan Halley, Research Scholar at SCBE, and supported by SCBE faculty and staff.

In addition to providing consultations, the new Team Science service will seek to identify challenges in multi-disciplinary collaboration that require further research.

Upon permission of teams requesting consultation services, we will develop case studies for dissemination through publications and on campus presentations. The goal is to enable new teams to learn from the experiences of others. Additionally, these case studies will serve as a team science learning bank for ongoing development of educational modules on best practices for translational collaboration. By identifying specific research questions that demand new approaches in real time, we are working to develop relevant, evidence-based institutional policies to support multi-disciplinary collaboration.

“Research performed at SCBE has shown that good team science is as much about institutional culture as it is about relationships between individual collaborators,” says SCBE’s Director, Dr. David Magnus. “We hope we can learn from cases what changes need to be made to create a culture that fosters strong team science."

Team Science consultations are available to research teams within the Stanford community who are seeking evidence-based, practical suggestions for addressing specific problems that arise during scientific collaborations. Reasons to engage a consult service vary, but may include a range of issues including, but not limited to:

• perceived imbalances in team rewards
• differential support of members regarding their participation in the team
• inefficiencies in team function or communication
• variation in expectations of authorship and contributions

Teams requesting consultation will have access to experienced translational experts in a broad range of disciplines across campus to address their specific challenges in team science and collaboration.

Contact Dr. Meghan Halley to learn more and to request a consultation.

Spectrum’s Team Science Consultation Service is supported by the Stanford CTSA Award Number UL1TR003142 from the National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS), a component of the National Institutes of Health.

Lee SS-J, Jabloner A. Institutional culture is the key to team science. Nat Biotechnol. 2017;35(12):1212-1214. doi:10.1038/nbt.4026