So Happy Together

By Karen M. Markin

Perhaps you love your scientific work because it allows you to spend lots of time outdoors, taking water samples in all kinds of weather. Or perhaps your scientific work allows you to hole up with your computer and run calculation after calculation as you seek solutions to problems. Either way, it's you and your intellectual pursuits, shielded from the day-to-day irritations of dealing with people.

So what could you possibly gain from collaborating with others as you pursue your scientific goals, exposing yourself to interpersonal conflict like a lab rat to a pathogen?

More money.

Whether we like it or not, collaboration is becoming the norm for much federally financed research. Sometimes the complexity of today's scientific questions requires investigators from a variety of disciplines to work together. In other cases, agencies seek multiple payoffs from their grant dollars: educational innovations and societal benefits as well as advances in basic science. Either way, the multiyear, multimilliondollar awards increasingly are reserved for collaborative work.

Some investigators may now be thinking, "I can play that game. I'll collect a bunch of individual research proposals, slap them together, and send them in under one title. More money for the same amount of effort on my part."

It doesn't work that way. Collaborative grants involve a great deal of effort in bringing together faculty members from a variety of disciplines, with their different values and perspectives, to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Scientific excellence is only part of the package.

Over and over, I have heard program officers say that in the collaborative proposals they see, scientific excellence is usually a given. What makes or breaks those proposals are the nonscience aspects, such as management and leadership. Here are some things to consider in preparing a competitive collaborative grant application.

Thinking Outside the College

First, understand that your idea of multidisciplinary and the grant agency's idea of that concept may be very different, and it is the agency's view that matters in grant writing. Faculty members often focus narrowly on their area of expertise, so that anything just a little different seems exotic. For example, a physical oceanographer might view a partnership with a biological oceanographer as multidisciplinary work.

While that may be so in the rarefied world of oceanography journals, it typically is not enough for a large grant agency. Such agencies want you to do more than think outside the department. They want you to think outside the college.

When I say "outside the college," I don't just mean the chemistry department joining hands with the chemical engineering department. In some instances, it can mean environmental scientists engaging with social scientists and humanists. Check past awards in the program that interests you to see what has been considered multidisciplinary.

Let's use the hypothetical example of a center for the study of natural disasters such as earthquakes to consider what a multidisciplinary collaboration might look like. The team will naturally include a seismologist, geophysicist and earthquake engineer. But a comprehensive center also might include social scientists. One might explore how groups of people behave when faced with an imminent threat. Another might be a public-policy expert who studies obstacles to effective emergency planning.

Those social scientists will have to be an integral part of the team. If you have an underlying disdain for what you view as "soft scientists," it will come through loud and clear.

For a truly collaborative project, you will need to accept them as equal partners rather than people whose biographical sketches you throw in merely to satisfy the program requirement for investigators outside of your discipline. You show that they are partners by providing resources for them in the budget. No one said that would be easy.

It is also wise to include them in development of the proposal to ensure it is sound from a scholarly standpoint. If you are a biologist and you write your conception of what your political-science colleagues will contribute instead of their conception, you will weaken your case for collaboration. You might make a fatal mistake, such as calling psychology one of the humanities. (It has happened.)

Reviewers of collaborative proposals will be drawn from the array of disciplines represented in the proposal. A political scientist from another institution will quickly notice if your social scientists are mere window dressing.

In planning your collaboration, think about an orchestra. If the violinist is fiddling away at a bluegrass melody, the clarinetist is tootling a klezmer tune, and the pianist is banging out Billy Joel, it's cacophony, no matter how good they are individually. But put them together for Rhapsody in Blue, and they're making music.

They Also Serve Who Only Push Paper

The entire scholarly team will have to accept that a large collaborative grant requires the services of people who aren't scientists but must be adequately paid. Some researchers find it anguishing to spend their scarce grant dollars on anything but lab equipment and scientific personnel.

But part of the challenge of a large collaborative grant is to manage it efficiently after you receive the award. That takes time, and you probably have firsthand experience with it. Do you complain when you have to submit annual and final reports for your grants? Think of that kind of work multiplied by a factor of 10 or 15, and you will begin to see the value of a project manager. Previous recipients of collaborative grants say that bad management, rather than bad science, is usually the reason that a renewal application is rejected.

Staffing needs will vary from program to program, but all collaborations need a manager and someone to oversee the budget. In some collaborative projects, agencies expect diversity and education efforts. Some investigators have hired full-time individuals for each of those duties.

In addition, you may be required to measure your success in diversity and education efforts. If so, find someone who specializes in program evaluation; such specialists usually reside in the social-science departments. Involve that person during proposal development, so you can begin your project knowing what you will measure, how you will measure it, and who will collect the data. You will need to allocate a portion of the budget for that person as well.

Although these administrative tasks may sound like punishment to you, some people enjoy them and perform them well. It will probably be easier for you to find a project manager than to persuade your co-investigators to put the position in the budget in the first place.

Follow the Leader

A collaborative grant requires strong leadership. The impetus must come from faculty members who are excited about pursuing the area of scientific inquiry at the heart of the project. The principal investigator should be a prominent scientist with a long record of extramural grants and publications.

But the project also needs someone to serve as its prime mover, and that person does not necessarily have to be the senior scientist. That individual has to be willing to put time and energy into pulling together the collaboration. He or she needs to be organized, a good time manager, a team builder, and able to take criticism in stride.

The project leader also must be able to persuade top institutional officials that multidisciplinary work is valuable and rewarded in tenure and promotion decisions. Those tasks are clearly not science, but they're essential to the success of the project. If you scoff at them as mere management clichés, find someone who takes them seriously.

Those who have formed collaborations emphasize that they take a lot of time. It is common to spend a year developing a collaborative proposal that is based on a decade of less formal interactions with other scientists.

As with any proposal, it may take two or three submissions before you get any money. But look on the bright side: The additional years you spend revising the proposal allow you to develop better relationships with your collaborators -- and to jettison the ones you don't want.