This Interdisciplinary Communication Laboratory for Undergraduate Biology (iCLUB) incubator project establishes a community of undergraduate biology faculty. These faculty regard healthy collaboration as essential to their research and teaching, especially in interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary efforts. A major goal of the network is the participation of this community of faculty, along with research collaborators from other disciplines such as mathematics, in Communication Labs led by experts in biology,and in interdisciplinary communication and communication arts.
Intellectual Merit: Communication Lab participants identify and address barriers to effective collaborative research at disciplinary intersections. Afterwards participants continue to explore solutions to these challenges as members of iCLUB online forums. This approach to professional development particularly focuses on helping faculty transfer new skills in interdisciplinary communication to their undergraduate students as part of their labs and courses, thus enhancing learning in undergraduate biology classrooms.
Broader Impacts: This incubator project provides the foundation for a comprehensive resource coordination network with the goal of discovering, creating and investigating tools for improving communication for biology faculty, undergraduate and graduate students and their collaborators working and teaching across disciplines. The iCLUB incubator is working towards this major goal by solidifying the Foundational Laboratory Workshop, developing an initial website, establishing an email list serve, hosting webinars for communication among network participants, and assessing the needs and priorities for future curriculum development.
This project is being jointly funded by the Directorate for Biological Sciences, Division of Biological Infrastructure and the Directorate for Education and Human Resources, Division of Undergraduate Education as part of their Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education efforts.
There is a growing awareness that major advances in research can be made through collaborations across traditional scientific disciplines. In order to solve the "big" problems facing our society scientists must increasingly collaborate at disciplinary intersections and indeed across public/private sectors. Students and faculty involved in interdisciplinary research activities often confront obstacles to healthy collaboration. These obstacles may include: Differences in personal and research values. Differences in research practices. Overall discomfort with the close interpersonal communication that is critical to any collaboration. We have built a community of researchers who are committed to acknowledging and overcoming communication barriers in research at disciplinary intersections. We developed two professional development workshops which have been well-attended and received. Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive with comments pointing to the usefulness of practicing communication skills in a supportive training environment. In addition to creating a workshop in which faculty and undergraduates at particular universities worked together to communicate at disciplinary intersections, we developed a trainer's workshop which helped us understand how to best serve individuals who wish to support collaboration training and development at their home universities. The trainer’s workshop allows individuals to work outside their own milieu to develop with peers of similar interests, and to bring this professional development back to difficult collaborative situations at their own universities. The trainers workshops are particularly effective as they bring senior people (full professors and administrators) together with graduate students and new faculty to increase the success of collaborative projects. iCLUB has provided opportunities for the researchers to advocate for explicit training in communication and collaboration skills in scientific classrooms and labs through key-note addresses, plenary talks, workshops, media appearances, and public forums.
