Building Cross-Disciplinary Research Collaborations.

Abstract

As a broad and heterogeneous diagnosis, stroke stands at the intersection of many related specialties. Thus, stroke researchers have a unique opportunity to collaborate across a wide range of clinical and basic science disciplines. In addition to the more obvious collaboration opportunities (eg working with cardiologists on clinical trials with composite cardiovascular outcomes), stroke researchers may work in fields as diverse as primary care, oncology, obstetrics, cognitive neuroscience, physiology, biomedical engineering, environmental science, and health disparities. Cross-disciplinary biomedical research synthesizes expertise from diverse contributing disciplines and develops new scientific approaches to address complex problems in health.1 Cross-disciplinary approaches can be as simple as research collaborations involving several medical subspecialties. More complex endeavors, such as collaborations between clinical researchers and scientists from widely different disciplines (eg engineers or social scientists), may be termed transdisciplinary research; however, similar principles apply. For the purposes of this discussion, we refer to the entire spectrum of multidisciplinary collaborative research as cross-disciplinary research. Collaborating with investigators outside your own field requires more than just adding a coauthor to a paper or proposal. True collaborations will not always be without conflict. Navigating the challenges of cross-disciplinary research successfully can lead to significant rewards in terms of job satisfaction and career development, and most importantly, to the advancement of scientific understanding. Early career vascular neurologists interested in growing robust cross-disciplinary research collaborations might consider the following approaches. A good research question identifies a gap in knowledge about a specific problem, which, in turn, may require expertise from multiple scientific disciplines to answer. For example, a stroke neurologist investigating intracranial atherosclerosis might collaborate with a vascular surgeon studying peripheral vascular disease, a radiologist studying vessel wall imaging, or a biomedical engineer measuring arterial compliance. Alternatively, a stroke neurologist might be interested in rare causes of stroke affecting a …