This research focuses on communication and cognitive processes of interdisciplinary research teams and their integration of distinctive disciplinary perspectives involved in unstructured problem solving at the frontiers of science and education. The pilot study collects and analyzes baseline data on six highly diverse, interdisciplinary research/teaching VIGRE groups in Statistics, Mathematics, and Computational and Applied Mathematics. The data include participant interviews, observations, and documents that will be analyzed to (1) determine how communication processes construct the development of expertise within groups and (2) the degree to which participants at various levels of the VIGRE groups increase certain communication skills required to deal with the complexity of interdisciplinary problems including: bioinformatics, data assimilation for space weather, and computational finance. These six teams offer a unique test bed for emerging interdisciplinary research at the intersection of cognition, communication processes, education, and innovation and organizational change. This research has potential for broad impact on other interdisciplinary programs, such as NSF's REU and IGERT programs, and teams involved in designing and coordinating complex research and development (R&D) activities in the government and private sector.
