Cross-disciplinary Research Team Research Articles

Opinion: Tropical cirrus – from micro-scale processes to climate-scale impacts

Abstract. Tropical cirrus clouds, i.e., any type of ice cloud with tops above 400 hPa, play a critical role in the climate system and are a major source of uncertainty in our understanding of global warming. Tropical cirrus clouds involve processes spanning a wide range of spatial and temporal scales, from ice microphysics on cloud scales to mesoscale convective organization and planetary wave dynamics. This complexity makes tropical cirrus clouds notoriously difficult to model and has left many important questions stubbornly unanswered. At the same time, their multi-scale nature makes them well-positioned to benefit from the rise of global, high-resolution simulations of Earth's atmosphere and a growing abundance of remotely sensed and in situ observations. Rapid progress on our understanding of tropical cirrus requires coordinated efforts to take advantage of these modern computational and observational abilities. In this opinion paper, we review recent progress in cirrus studies, highlight important unanswered questions, and discuss promising paths forward. Significant progress has been made in understanding the life cycle of convectively generated “anvil” cirrus and the response of their macrophysical properties to large-scale controls. On the other hand, much work remains to be done to fully understand how small-scale anvil processes and the climatological anvil radiative effect will respond to global warming. Thin, in situ formed cirrus clouds are now known to be closely tied to the thermal structure and humidity of the tropical tropopause layer, but microphysical uncertainties prevent a full understanding of this link, as well as the precise amount of water vapor entering the stratosphere. Model representation of ice-nucleating particles, water vapor supersaturation, and ice depositional growth continue to pose great challenges to cirrus modeling. We believe that major advances in the understanding of tropical cirrus can be made through a combination of cross-tool synthesis and cross-scale studies conducted by cross-disciplinary research teams.

Applying design research for cross-disciplinary collaboration: Experiences from a gamification process

This study explores applying design science research (DSR) frameworks to facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration towards game development. It uses a DSR framework proposed by Peffers et al (2014) to integrate the knowledge and experiences of a cross-disciplinary research team and develop a game which gamifies the investment decision-making process of energy communities. The framework employed for this paper constituted five phases around problem identification, definition of solution objectives, artefact design and development, demonstration and evaluation. The iterative process of the framework allowed for gradual but incremental improvement in the outcome and the associated artefacts and sustained researcher collaboration. The resultant interactive in-person game required the participants (or their teams) to navigate through the complexities of the decision-making process in a community while considering factors such as information asymmetry, uncertain return on investments, time constraints, etc. The game was instantiated twice and was able to engage players effectively. Moreover, the post-game evaluation indicated that the players acquired learning about energy communities. The participants developed an understanding of the game only gradually and their engagement in the later rounds of the game. Three distinct investment strategies emerged from the two instantiations (diversification, focus on centralised options, or focus on decentralised options). The participants preferred to maintain a strategy rather than reacting situationally. This gamification experience, albeit applicable to this specific research context, shows that DSR frameworks can be successfully applied to facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration because they allow for more flexible and iterative knowledge exchange. The post-game evaluation helped identify avenues for further improvements, such as focusing on incremental-iterative development of the output, expanding the flexibility and visibility of the game, involving a more balanced research team, etc. The contribution of this study lies in extending the discourse on cross-disciplinary collaboration by incorporating DSR frameworks and demonstrating the application of game-based learning beyond end-user application.

Application to promote communication between midwives and Arabic-speaking women at antenatal care: Challenges met by researchers when developing content.

Providing good communication is at the core of recent international guidelines for improving women's outcomes at birth. Communication barriers are identified as major obstacles to providing effective and equal care among foreign-born women. There is a need for accurate communication tools in antenatal care. The aim of this study was to describe challenges met by researchers when developing culturally sensitive content in a Swedish-Arabic application for communication support at antenatal care in Sweden. A co-design methodology was used for the development of the application, entailing collaboration between users and researchers in five different phases: users' needs and preferences, development, field testing I, refinement, and field testing II. Five challenges emerged: evidence-based information, time frame, realistic photographs, norm-critical perspective, and cultural issues. One challenge was to meet the needs of the users and combine it with information following evidence-based obstetric welfare guidelines. It was also challenging to produce short informational videos that could be adjusted for the duration of the visit with the midwife without omitting important information and to produce photographs which can become outdated. It was also a challenge to portray a less clinical environment and to maintain parents' integrity. It was also challenging to produce norm-critical content from the women's perspective. When developing content of an application for antenatal care, converting content proposals into a finished product is challenging. Collaboration between a cross-disciplinary research team, midwives and target-language women is essential to ensure that the content is usable and reliable.

Abstract 1901: VisComm: A cloud-based platform for accessing and creating scientific visualization for the pediatric cancer research community

Abstract Scientific visualization is important to cancer research as different graphs enable researchers to spot trends and detect outliers in large-scale, high-dimensional data. For example, mutation landscape maps integrate mutational and clinical data, revealing which somatic alterations are most closely associated with diagnoses, age, ethnicity, and outcome; t-SNE plots allow dissection of cancer subtypes based on gene expression or methylation profiling. These graphs are often created by researchers after extensive data curation and optimization of the layout using software tools designed for data visualization and are commonly presented as static figures in published literature. To permit seamless access to the genomic and epigenomic visualization tools created at St. Jude, we developed Visualization Community (https://viz.stjude.cloud/, VisComm), which allows researchers to explore published graphs, develop custom visualization for their private data, and also serve as a public repository for completed graphs, as part of the St. Jude Cloud data sharing ecosystem. Sixty-five (65) interactive graphs from 31 publications in 231 pediatric subtypes are currently available, including t-SNE plots of RNA-seq and methylation data, mutation landscape maps, variant visualization on protein or genomic axes, epigenome states, and chromatin contact interactions. The graphs are searchable by cancer diagnosis, molecular profiling, research interest, publication, and research organization with features designed to enable user customization. To date, 5,014 users, 25% of whom are recurrent, have accessed VisComm. On average, each public visualization has over 4,000 views while the most accessed graph has >13,000 views. We have developed the ability to work in teams with in VisComm to empower collaborative development of new visualizations and controlled release by a research team. This feature enables the professional quality visualizations serve as resources for focused scientific communities such as the Audacious Goals Initiative (AGI) - Retina), a multi-institutional cross-disciplinary research team whose goal is restoring vision to patients by regenerating retinas. Videos and textual tutorials are being prepared using data generated from programs such as the Genome for Kids (G4K), a clinical genomic profiling program, that will help guide users to apply the underlying visualization software tools and to integrate public and private data of all types. VisComm is the first platform dedicated to enabling the development and sharing of interactive high-quality data-rich visualizations, which we expect will enhance data exploration and hypothesis generation for cancer research. Citation Format: David B. Finkelstein, James Madson, Lucian Vacaroiu, Alexander M. Gout, Leonard Hirja, Stephanie Sandor, Andrew Thrasher, Colleen Reilly, Jian Wang, Xiaolong Chen, Xin Zhou, Jinghui Zhang, Clay McLeod. VisComm: A cloud-based platform for accessing and creating scientific visualization for the pediatric cancer research community [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2022; 2022 Apr 8-13. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2022;82(12_Suppl):Abstract nr 1901.

Translating research into policy and action.

Translating research into policy and action.

A pluralistic approach to the definition, classification, and explanation of gangs

The extensive impact of gang-related harms on communities has led to a broad range of stakeholders investing in attempts to respond to gangs. Resultantly, many gang definitions, typologies, and explanations have been developed and adopted. This uncoordinated multiplicity has presented significant difficulties for developing shared understandings and responses to gangs across relevant parties. To overcome such pitfalls, researchers have begun to pursue a framework of unificationism through the establishment of consensus definitions of gangs, cross-disciplinary research teams, and unified theories for gang occurrences. Drawing upon insights from other disciplines, we argue against the adoption of an overarching unificationist framework instead endorsing a pluralistic approach to gang research. We develop a novel framework – The Conceptual Framework for Gang Research – for guiding the coordinated construction/adoption of a multiplicity of conceptual tools specifically tailored to facilitate the diverse aims of gang researchers and demonstrate the utility of this approach over current conventional approaches. • We consider the limitations of the current pursuit of unification in gang research. • The roles of conceptual strategies in science are discussed. • A pluralistic approach to the coordination of gang research is endorsed. • We present The Conceptual Framework for Gang Research .

STEARNS CENTER FEATURED SESSION [for deans, chairs, curriculum coordinators] : From COVID to Change: Rethinking Supporting Teaching in Your Unit (90 mins)

NOTE: This session is designed to be both an informative panel and a planning workshop for deans, chairs, and anyone leading a group of faculty/adjunct/GTAs, common course or curriculum effort in their unit.Description:Mason is actively engaged in changing the culture of teaching toward more active- and inquiry-based learning forms. These forms are viewed as superior mechanisms for improving student engagement, performance, and retention, especially in STEM-based classrooms (Kogan & Laursen, 2014; Freeman et al., 2014; Laursen, Hassi, Logan, & Weston, 2014; Nelson, 2010). Through Mason’s strategic plan and its building of new active learning classrooms, the opportunities to leverage this pedagogical form are ripe. Despite this commitment, teaching change is often difficult to engender in higher education organizations. Some of this difficulty lies in the challenge of changing faculty habits and norms related to their own teaching practices (Austin, 2011). However, even if individual faculty are committed to pedagogical change, that change is also highly dependent upon departmental and institutional norms and barriers, which can act to promote or constrain change (Austin, 2011; D’Avanzo, 2013; Brownell & Tanner, 2012; Henderson et al., 2012; Sunal et al., 2001; Fairweather, 2008). There are levers that go beyond the individual and their classroom to improve the likelihood of successful pedagogical change. Among these are the use of data-driven decision making and the fostering of data cultures (Bouwma-Gearheart & Hora, 2014; Hora & Bouwma-Gearhart, 2014, 2017) and the building and leveraging of collaborations across organizational units (Kezar & Lester, 2009; Klein, 2017; Leisyte & Dee, 2012) to help leverage the information, relationships, and resources needed to enact change. The purpose of this workshop is to use the context and learning from current work being done to enact pedagogical change to help attendees frame, consider, and plan for how relationships, resources, and data within and beyond their departments can be used in their own contexts to enact similar change. The presenters, members of a cross-disciplinary research team, are working alongside members of course-based communities of transformation (CCTs) in Mathematics and Physics at Mason, with CCTs in Biology and Computer Science to follow. These researchers will share empirical evidence, lessons learned, and practical implications related to their National Science Foundation funded project to create department and institution-level change that supports the adoption of active learning pedagogy at Mason. As a part of this work, CCT members have had to consider and act beyond the boundaries of their individual classrooms and departments to leverage organizational data and partnerships. This project is designed to develop a university culture that values the incorporation of active learning practices in undergraduate STEM courses and programs. Attendees will develop a better sense of how to find and use data in decision making and conversations with those within and beyond their departments, including understanding and identifying course taking and retention patterns, resource needs and opportunities, and student learning and preparedness. Attendees will identify key partnership and collaborations they can continue or begin to cultivate as they work to create change in their departments and learn how to improve cross-unit collaboration. Attendees will be given time to consider the needs, strategies, and resources necessary for change in their communities and craft plans for starting that change.

Proving the proof of concept; developing new methods and knowledge to evaluate products supporting cancer therapy

ABSTRACTThis article illuminates through a case study, SuPPORT 4 All (Support, Positioning and Organ stabilisation during breast cancer radiation therapy/S4A). It describes how three-dimensional design research assesses, assimilates and is applied to define product requirements in a cross-disciplinary research team, activity occurring concurrently, yet also informing the act of designing the eventual products themselves. The study describes how a multidisciplinary research and development team, more specifically the design researchers within it, developed a range of holistic knowledge sets to establish critical criteria to validate physical outcomes. The study illustrates the methods used and developed to elicit the scale of the challenge and discusses the validity of these methods and technologies when wide-ranging design specifications may not exist at project outset.

Drawing on healthcare professionals' ethnicity: lessons learned from a Danish community pharmacy intervention for ethnic minorities.

To present and discuss implementation experiences regarding the involvement of community pharmacists with ethnic minority backgrounds in a medication review intervention for ethnic minority poly-pharmacy patients in Denmark. Data sources include 1) reflection notes from an introductory seminar with pharmacists and the cross-disciplinary research team and 2) five individual interviews and one focus group interview with pharmacists. Data were thematically coded and synthesised to identify underlying rationales and challenges encountered when involving professionals with ethnic minority backgrounds in interventions for ethnic minorities. Informants perceived the need for interventions targeted at ethnic minority poly-pharmacy patients, and highlighted the potential of involving professionals with diverse ethnic backgrounds in such interventions. However, implementation created challenges, because the professional identity of the pharmacists reduced their options for serving as peers with the same ethnic background. Furthermore, issues related to organisational difficulties and overcoming language barriers in the intervention impacted on the potential of involving professionals with ethnic minority backgrounds. Involving healthcare professionals with ethnic minority backgrounds in encounters with ethnic minorities holds potential for the adaptation of services to ethnically diverse populations, thus improving access to and quality of care. However, it is important to ensure sufficient personal and organisational support and to acknowledge the delicate balance between simultaneously serving as a peer and as a professional.

Teaming up and mixing methods: collaborative and cross-disciplinary work in corpus research on phraseology

Inspired by my positive experiences gained as a member of cross-disciplinary research teams, this paper explores the value of collaborative work in corpus linguistics. I discuss selected results from three studies that showcase research on phraseology: a study that attempts to measure formulaic language in first- and second-language writing, a study on attended/unattended this and its patterns in student writing, and a study on speaker knowledge and use of verb–argument constructions. My collaborators on these studies include a psycholinguist, a computational linguist, a cognitive linguist and a genre analysis expert. This paper highlights the ways in which combining research methods from different fields can be beneficial to research outcomes in phraseology, and calls for more collaboration between corpus linguists and scholars from neighbouring disciplines.

The SES-Framework as boundary object to address theory orientation in social–ecological system research: The SES-TheOr approach

Social–ecological system (SES) research is inherently cross-disciplinary which can create multiple challenges for building knowledge of SES. Some of these challenges relate to differences in ontological commitments due to theory orientation of individual disciplines. Frameworks, understood as boundary objects, have been suggested as tools for dealing with this type of challenge. This paper investigates this capacity of frameworks taking Elinor Ostroms' SES-Framework as an example. To this aim, we developed a generic approach (the SES-TheOr approach) to promote disclosure and bridge differences in ontological commitments in SES research. We then applied it for examining the use of the SES Framework as boundary object within a small cross-disciplinary research team. We found that the SES Framework provided a useful common reference and starting point for discussing variables but could not fully deal with theory orientation. We conclude by suggesting that this may partly arise due to a tension between two competing SES Framework aims: on the one hand bridging differences in ontological commitments, and on the other hand ensuring a comparative function across cases.

Your Hypothesis or Mine? Terminological and Conceptual Variation Across Disciplines

Cross-disciplinary research (CDR) is a necessary response to many current pressing problems, yet CDR practitioners face diverse research challenges. Communication challenges can limit a CDR team’s ability to collaborate effectively, including differing use of scientific terms among teammates. To illustrate this, we examine the conceptual complexity and cross-disciplinary ambiguity of the term hypothesis as it is used by researchers participating in 16 team building workshops. These workshops assist CDR teams in finding common ground about fundamental research assumptions through philosophically structured dialogue. Our results show that team members often have very different perceptions about the nature of hypotheses, the role of hypotheses in science, and the use of hypotheses within different disciplines. Furthermore, we find that such assumptions can be rooted in disciplinary-based training. These data indicate that potentially problematic terminological differences exist within CDR teams, and exercises that reveal this early in the collaborative process may be beneficial.

National Institute of Nursing Research Centers of Excellence: A logic model for sustainability, leveraging resources, and collaboration to accelerate cross-disciplinary science

The National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) Centers of Excellence program is a catalyst enabling institutions to develop infrastructure and administrative support for creating cross-disciplinary teams that bring multiple strategies and expertise to bear on common areas of science. Centers are increasingly collaborative with campus partners and reflect an integrated team approach to advance science and promote the development of scientists in these areas. The purpose of this paper is to present the NINR Logic Model for Center Sustainability. The components of the logic model were derived from the presentations and robust discussions at the 2013 NINR center directors' meeting focused on best practices for leveraging resources and collaboration as methods to promote center sustainability. Collaboration through development and implementation of cross-disciplinary research teams is critical to accelerate the generation of new knowledge for solving fundamental health problems. Sustainability of centers as a long-term outcome beyond the initial funding can be enhanced by thoughtful planning of inputs, activities, and leveraging resources across multiple levels.

Using bibliometrics to support the facilitation of cross‐disciplinary communication

Given the importance of cross‐disciplinary research (CDR), facilitating CDR effectiveness is a priority for many institutions and funding agencies. There are a number of CDR types, however, and the effectiveness of facilitation efforts will require sensitivity to that diversity. This article presents a method characterizing a spectrum of CDR designed to inform facilitation efforts that relies on bibliometric techniques and citation data. We illustrate its use by the Toolbox Project, an ongoing effort to enhance cross‐disciplinary communication in CDR teams through structured, philosophical dialogue about research assumptions in a workshop setting. Toolbox Project workshops have been conducted with more than 85 research teams, but the project's extensibility to an objectively characterized range of CDR collaborations has not been examined. To guide wider application of the Toolbox Project, we have developed a method that uses multivariate statistical analyses of transformed citation proportions from published manuscripts to identify candidate areas of CDR, and then overlays information from previous Toolbox participant groups on these areas to determine candidate areas for future application. The approach supplies 3 results of general interest: A way to employ small data sets and familiar statistical techniques to characterize CDR spectra as a guide to scholarship on CDR patterns and trends. A model for using bibliometric techniques to guide broadly applicable interventions similar to the Toolbox. A method for identifying the location of collaborative CDR teams on a map of scientific activity, of use to research administrators, research teams, and other efforts to enhance CDR projects.

Philosophical intervention and cross-disciplinary science: the story of the Toolbox Project

In this article we argue that philosophy can facilitate improvement in cross-disciplinary science. In particular, we discuss in detail the Toolbox Project, an effort in applied epistemology that deploys philosophical analysis for the purpose of enhancing collaborative, cross-disciplinary scientific research through improvements in cross-disciplinary communication. We begin by sketching the scientific context within which the Toolbox Project operates, a context that features a growing interest in and commitment to cross-disciplinary research (CDR). We then develop an argument for the leading idea behind this effort, namely, that philosophical dialogue can improve cross-disciplinary science by effecting epistemic changes that lead to better group communication. On the heels of this argument, we describe our approach and its output; in particular, we emphasize the Toolbox instrument that generates philosophical dialogue and the Toolbox workshop in which that dialogue takes place. Together, these constitute a philosophical intervention into the life of CDR teams. We conclude by considering the philosophical implications of this intervention.

Implementing Participatory Water Management: Recent Advances in Theory, Practice, and Evaluation

Many current water planning and management problems are riddled with high levels of complexity, uncertainty, and conflict, so-called “messes” or “wicked problems.” The realization that there is a need to consider a wide variety of values, knowledge, and perspectives in a collaborative decision making process has led to a multitude of new methods and processes being proposed to aid water planning and management, which include participatory forms of modeling, planning, and decision aiding processes. However, despite extensive scientific discussions, scholars have largely been unable to provide satisfactory responses to two pivotal questions: (1) What are the benefits of using participatory approaches?; (2) How exactly should these approaches be implemented in complex social-ecological settings to realize these potential benefits? In the study of developing social-ecological system sustainability, the first two questions lead to a third one that extends beyond the one-time application of participatory approaches for water management: (3) How can participatory approaches be most appropriately used to encourage transition to more sustainable ecological, social, and political regimes in different cultural and spatial contexts? The answer to this question is equally open. This special feature on participatory water management attempts to propose responses to these three questions by outlining recent advances in theory, practice, and evaluation related to the implementation of participatory water management. The feature is largely based on an extensive range of case studies that have been implemented and analyzed by cross-disciplinary research teams in collaboration with practitioners, and in a number of cases in close cooperation with policy makers and other interested parties such as farmers, fishermen, environmentalists, and the wider public.

SP4-35 “Sense of injustice” a mechanism to explain social inequalities in health

BackgroundThere is an increasing interest in the literature to examine plausible mechanisms explaining social inequalities in health above and beyond income. We propose “sense of injustice”, coined by Cahn, a...

The Dynamics of Material Artifacts in Collaborative Research Teams

Boundary objects are material artifacts that mediate the relationship between two or more disparate perspectives. The concept of boundary objects has been demonstrably useful in a variety of research areas; however, the meaning and function of boundary objects is contested. At issue is the relationship between boundary objects that negotiate between perspectives and those that specify across perspectives. In this study the changing nature of boundary objects in cooperative work is related to the dynamics of evolving problem conceptualization, system design, and enactment within cooperative work settings. Design based research on material artifacts produced by an incipient cross-disciplinary research team during their efforts towards negotiating integrated conceptualizations and specifying shared research agendas is used to generate a more comprehensive model of boundary objects through the life of a project.

Smoothing the Waters

Although both research funders and knowledge users continue to call for more and higher-quality collaboration between researchers from different disciplines, there is little evidence available to inform the structure and management of cross-disciplinary research teams. A descriptive account of cross-disciplinary collaboration is presented based on a study of a cross-disciplinary team researching natural resource degradation issues. A number of tools are identified that characterize and support the collaboration process, including the use of story-lines and metaphor, choice of vocabulary, the nature of dialogue and the role of mediating agents. Four products of collaboration are also identified: ‘process’, ‘understanding’, ‘utility’ and ‘knowledge integration’. Conclusions focus on the implications for research programme design and the content of research training curricula.

Transfer of Information Technology to the Arab World

The complex societal beliefs and values of the Arab world provide a rich setting to examine the hypothesized influence of culture on information technology transfer (ITT). Two research questions arise in this context: (1) Do cultural beliefs and values affect the transference of information technology in the Arab world? and (2) Does contact with technologically advanced societies impact ITT and systems outcomes? The present study addresses these research questions by conceptualizing and testing a cultural influence model of ITT. In this model, cultural beliefs and values are one major construct while a counterbalancing variable is the external influence of technologically advanced societies. These constructs along with the variable “national IT development” form the conceptual basis for the model. This study is the second part of a program of research investigating ITT. The setting of the study was Arab society, which allowed us to test our “cultural influence” model in, perhaps, one of the more complex cultural and social systems in the world. The program of research took place in several phases. In the early phases, Arab-American businessmen and women as well as Arabs studying in American universities were studied. In the latter phases, the cross-disciplinary research team gathered primary data in the Arab cultures of Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and the Sudan. Both quantitative and qualitative techniques were used to explore the phenomenon of ITT. This paper reports quantitative findings from the latter phase. Findings suggest that the model has explanatory power. Arab cultural beliefs were a very strong predictor of resistance to systems and thus ITT; technological culturation was also a factor. These results have implications for future theory-testing and for technology policy-setting by responsible Arab leaders. Additionally, there are implications for transnational firms and managers charged with introducing IT in foreign ports, subsidiaries, offices, and plants.