About TSAL

Who is the Team Scholarship Acceleration Lab (TSAL)?

There have been several researchers at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), who have made the study of team scholarship their primary area of research. The UCI Vice Chancellor for Research, Pramod Khargonekar, invited this group to work with him on some problems pertaining to team scholarship. After a series of discussions with him, and briefings of key administrators, we formed the Team Scholarship Acceleration Lab (TSAL).

 

The principal faculty members are:

Maritza Salazar Campo

Assistant Professor, Merage School of Business

Judtih Olson

Professor Emeritus, Department of Informatics

Gary Olson

Professor Emeritus, Department of Informatics

Dan Stokols

Professor Emeritus, School of Social Ecology

How can TSAL experts help you?

Members of TSAL are available to work with you to help you succeed in your Team Scholarship.  There are a number of ways we can help.  We can:

  1. Give a talk about Team Scholarship, what benefits you get from it and what obstacles you will have to overcome and how to overcome them.
  2. Lead a "Lunch and Learn" session to help the researchers on your Team Scholarship team generate new ideas for research or assess their transdisciplinary readiness.
  3. Work with you to write up the Management Plan of a grant proposal, demonstrating to the evaluators your sophistication in supporting collaboration.
  4. Be written into your grant as an ongoing consultant on matters having to do with collaboration.

 

Some additional ways that we can assist your research team include the following:

 

  1. Develop a team charter or collaboration plan at the outset of the project to help guide the center's collaborative processes over the five-year initiative (e.g., specifying agreements for developing and sharing credit on research reports; procedures for resolving collaborative conflicts as they arise)
  2. Provide team science training toolkits for co-investigators and trainees
  3. Offer formative evaluation over the course of the project to assess progress toward meeting collaborative goals
  4. Provide consultation to assist team members in refining collaborative processes and outcomes
  5. Present team science training to faculty and trainees during the start-up phase of a collaborative project
  6. Deliver convergence science training and consultation to members during each year of the center's operations
  7. Share leadership activities across the core institutions to effectively integrate research activities
  8. Develop strategies to leverage the team's diverse composition to enable maximum innovation; identify milestone goals for each year of the project as well as metrics for evaluating progress toward meeting them
  9. Consult with the team's investigators about technologies and best practices for facilitating online collaboration among spatially remote team members
  10. Consult with the teams about ways to enhance interpersonal cohesion and intellectual synergy as they collaborate over the course of the project.

After consulting with TSAL members, some subset of the activities listed above can be listed in the Management Plan for grant proposals.