Transdisciplinary Health Research Research Articles

Transdisciplinary Team Science in Health Research, Where Are We?

Modern medicine and healthcare systems focus on diagnosing, treating, and monitoring diseases in clinical practice. However, contemporary disease burden is driven by chronic diseases, whose determinants occur across multiple levels of influence, from genetics to changes in the natural, built environments to societal conditions and policies. Conventional discipline-specific approaches are useful for the discovery and accumulation of knowledge on single causes of disease entities. Multidisciplinary collaborations can facilitate the identification of the causes of diseases at multiple levels, while interdisciplinary collaboration remains limited to transferring tools from one discipline to another, perhaps creating new disciplines (molecular epidemiology, etc). However, these forms of disciplinary collaboration fall short in capturing the complexity of chronic disease. In addition, these approaches lack sufficient power to generate knowledge that is translatable into implementable solutions, because of their failure to provide a holistic view limited their ability to capture the complexity of real-world problems. Transdisciplinary collaborations gained popularity in health research in the 1990 s, when disciplinary researchers began to develop integrated research frameworks that transcended discipline-specific methods. Using cancer research as an example, this position paper describes the nature of different disciplinary collaborations, reviews transdisciplinary research projects funded by the US National Cancer Institute, discusses frameworks to develop shared mental models in teams and to evaluate transdisciplinary collaboration, highlights the role of team science in successful transdisciplinary health research, and proposes future research to develop the science of team science.

A new transdisciplinary research model to investigate and improve the health of the public.

SummaryTransdisciplinary research approaches are being applied to today’s complex health problems, including the climate crisis and widening inequalities. Diverse forms of disciplinary and experiential knowledge are required to understand these challenges and develop workable solutions. We aimed to create an updated model reflective of the strengths and challenges of current transdisciplinary health research that can be a guide for future studies. We searched Medline using terms related to transdisciplinary, health and research. We coded data deductively and inductively using thematic analysis to develop a preliminary model of transdisciplinary research. The model was tested and improved through: (i) a workshop with 27 participants at an international conference in Xiamen, China and (ii) online questionnaire feedback from included study authors. Our revised model recommends the following approach: (i) co-learning, an ongoing phase that recognizes the distributed nature of knowledge generation and learning across partners; (ii) (pre-)development, activities that occur before and during project initiation to establish a shared mission and ways of working; (iii) reflection and refinement to evaluate and improve processes and results, responding to emergent information and priorities as an ongoing phase; (iv) conceptualization to develop goals and the study approach by combining diverse knowledge; (v) investigation to conduct the research; (vi) implementation to use new knowledge to solve societal problems. The model includes linear and cyclical processes that may cycle back to project development. Our new model will support transdisciplinary research teams and their partners by detailing the necessary ingredients to conduct such research and achieve health impact.

NIH DR2 Empowering Data Collection for the COVID-19 Research Response

The National Institute of Health’s (NIH) Disaster Research Response (DR2) Program (https://dr2.nlm.nih.gov/) leads the nation in fostering improvements in processes, frameworks, and infrastructure for executing timely and complex research responses to disasters and emerging threats. The growing field of disaster research aims to advance transdisciplinary health research, and place environmental health into disaster response planning and to better understand the health impacts of disasters. One of the important ways to promote ethical post disaster research is through sharing best practices and existing research tools and protocols. DR2 hosts a website to collate and host a collection of tools to minimize the proliferation of one-off survey items, encourage comparisons across samples, and facilitate data integration and collaboration. This repository was initially created to focus on common disasters with an environmental impact, such as floods or hurricanes. Disaster focused tools include those for environmental sampling, biospecimen collection and for understanding the impacts of a disaster on a community. But environment and health are impacted by more than floods and accidents, and with the emergence of the SARS COV2 virus, a flurry of new data collection tools are being created by the hour. In an effort to minimize one off tool creation and to help provide researchers easy access to other questions of interest, early on in the COVID-19 response, DR2 organized meetings and correspondence across NIH Institutes and Centers to coordinate a process for tool collection and dissemination. DR2 now hosts COVID-19 related research protocols for new and existing cohorts and research studies. Multiple NIH Institutes and Centers and funding programs are encouraging not only data sharing, but sharing of tools and recommending researchers share via DR2. This unique platform, a voluntary, self submitted data collection platform is an important part of advancing DR2’s mission to better share and standardize disaster research. Keywords: COVID, Research, tools, data sharing

Crossing Silos and Networking to Advance Environmental Health Disaster Research

No change in the environment is as extreme, or often as sudden, as the change that comes after a disaster. The Disaster Research Response (DR2) Program, championed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is an important component in understanding environmental health threats and issues following a disaster. While an increasing number of environmental health researchers are taking steps to prepare for, and to conduct, research in disaster environments, they often work in disciplinary silos, whereas the impacts of disasters are often crosscutting, impacting divergent communities, scientific disciplines, and across jurisdictional borders. Previous responses to disasters like the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill have inspired efforts to improve the nation’s capacity to perform timely interdisciplinary disaster research. Many new efforts are springing up to promote transformative collaborations in disaster research. This session will include a mix of discussions highlighting specific situations involving applied epidemiologic research or efforts to improve the process for such research to be performed. Speakers begin by explaining the importance of disaster research to environmental health. Presenters will then discuss the development and accomplishments of a new environmental health sciences disaster research community of practice and ongoing efforts to facilitate behavioral, geoscience, and environmental health disaster research. Efforts to develop international networks, as well as to foster new strategies for applied research for humanitarian crises will be presented. A discussion will include ongoing efforts to develop IRB pre-reviewed protocols, guidance, and tools to help support and expedite timely research. Additional discussions will include examples of rapid collaborations among academic institutions after a major hurricane and a recent disaster workshop that sought to reach outside environmental health to the clinical care setting to harmonize and build capacity for disaster data collection and sharing. Presenters will share experiences, case studies, and lessons learned as part of these evolving efforts. Please describe how the symposia relates to the meeting theme of Advancing Environmental Health in a Changing World. (100 words max): Disasters and accidents are an extreme example of changing environments in a changing world. In seemingly the blink of an eye, a community can be impacted by contamination, floodwaters, or wildfire smoke and suddenly be concerned about environmental exposures they never considered previously. The growing field of disaster research, championed by the NIH Disaster Research Response Program (DR2), the NSF Natural Hazards Center, Fogarty International Center, and others seek to advance transdisciplinary health research, and place environmental health into disaster response planning, for changing and challenging situations. Recent efforts, in the US and globally, to conduct disaster research and to bring together researchers have begun to advance this important field of research.

The transdisciplinary health research apparatus: A Baradian account of knowledge boundaries and beyond.

This paper engages with new materialist theory to reimagine transdisciplinary health research. In particular, we draw upon Karen Barad's theory of agential realism and concept of apparatus to rethink the processes of doing transdisciplinary research. A Baradian inspired approach to transdisciplinarity encourages us to not only explore ways of knowing health phenomena differently by working across disciplines, but also to pay close attention to the politics and practices in such research. We offer a case study based on a two-year transdisciplinary research project focused on the health condition known as Low Energy Availability (LEA) in sportswomen. Through this case we highlight three key ways that Barad's concept of apparatus helped us know transdisciplinarity differently: (1) Reading disciplines through each other, (2) Intra-actions and the everyday performativity of disciplinary boundaries, and (3) Troubling the boundaries of the apparatus. Ultimately this paper illustrates the value in feminist new materialist conceptual tools for encouraging different questions of transdisciplinary research as ethico-onto-epistemological practices, processes, and politics of knowledge production.

The biological, biographical, and biospheric dimensions of puberty onset: Using Bio3Science to frame transdisciplinary health research on puberty

Introduction: This paper uses the case of puberty to characterize a new health science framework called Bio3Science and to provide an example of how trending research on biosocial mechanisms can be put to use to bridge siloed disciplines as well as the translational gap. Examined as an intricate, open-ended problem of scientific understanding, puberty offers a window to examine how three dimensions of human life – biology, biography, and biosphere – can be understood to shape human health and disease. Methods: Using the Bio3Science framework, a biosocial model of puberty was developed and critiqued by an interdisciplinary group of health science and social science researchers in a design studio setting. Results: The design and critique process resulted in a model and new conceptual framework that depicts puberty as a highly variable life experience that integrates multiple dense interactions and context-specific responses; within this model, the gene regulatory network (GRN) transformed from a biological to a biosocial mechanism, with conceptual and concrete applications. Conclusions: By providing a new, generalizable framework for understanding the integration of biology, biography, and biosphere in health research, opportunities emerge for more interdisciplinary work puberty, but also and more broadly, for more collaborative, inter-epistemological health research through the Bio3Science framework. Keywords: Bio3Science, puberty, biosocial, gene regulatory network, normality

Measuring multidisciplinary health research at South African universities: a comparative analysis based on co-authorships and journal subject categories

This study developed a comparative bibliometric profile of multidisciplinary health research at South African universities over a 30-year period (1984–2013), based on two measures of multidisciplinarity. The first measure used article co-authorship as a proxy for collaboration between authors with health and non-health addresses, and the second measure focussed on articles published in journals with both health and non-health subject categories. The article overlap between the two measures was 25%, meaning that one measure would exclude 75% of articles identified by the other. Both showed an increase in the percentage contribution of multidisciplinary health research to health research over time, and both generated similar profiles of the national institutions that contribute to multidisciplinary health research. Both measures also provided evidence of a sustained increase in the percentage international co-authorship in health research although the second measure gave a markedly lower estimate of the percentage international co-authorship. These preliminary results would need to be followed up with more advanced bibliometric approaches, and possibly qualitative analyses to investigate the degree of integration between disciplines, pointing to interdisciplinary or even transdisciplinary health research.

Transdisciplinary Screening and Intervention for Nutrition, Swallowing, Cognition and Communication: A Case Study

Background: Transdisciplinary health research and clinical practice is supported by numerous Australian health workforce documents and the broader transdisciplinary research literature. This research assessed the impact of early screening and limited intervention for nutrition, swallowing, cognition, and communication deficits in medical admissions in a large metropolitan hospital. Methods and Findings: Validated screening tools were selected and consensus for interventions were obtained by dietetic and speech pathology disciplines. Intensive training was undertaken to familiarize staff members with the screening documents and project scope. Ethics approval was obtained. Participants included 179 patients aged ≥65 years admitted to the emergency department or medical unit. The project significantly reduced referral time to both disciplines, and time to full assessment in dietetics but not speech pathology. Results found 43% of patients were malnourished or at risk of malnutrition, and 14 patients had oral intake ceased due to swallowing difficulties.Conclusions: This study has demonstrated that transdisciplinary screening and intervention may work within dietetics and speech pathology, providing an innovative extension to practice. Further alternatives using this model include the use of allied health assistants or less-experienced clinicians, while opportunities exist for transdisciplinary practices within other healthcare disciplines.

Shaping Education and Training to Advance Transdisciplinary Health Research

Despite at least two decades of effort, the United States has made little progress in addressing the health disparities experienced by its most vulnerable residents. For many diseases, the gaps in health between groups continue to grow. In this paper, we first build a case for the importance of a transdisciplinary approach to eliminating health disparities, based on the premise that executing successful disparities research depends on the ability to visualize the multiple influences on health and health disparities and understand the complex ways in which they interact with one another to produce worse outcomes for some groups than others. We argue that our failure to prepare investigators to conduct transdisciplinary research has greatly impeded our progress toward eliminating the nation’s disparities. Finally, we articulate the challenges of implementing transdisciplinary education and training and recommend elements of a successful transdisciplinary educational program in health.

A transdisciplinary training program for behavioral oncology and cancer control scientists

Transdisciplinary health research training has been identified as a major initiative to achieve the vision for research teams of the future as articulated in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap for Medical Research. To address the need for scientists who can integrate diverse scientific approaches and work in transdisciplinary teams to solve complex health problems, Indiana University (IU) has designed an innovative training program that will provide the didactic and research experiences to enable trainees to establish productive careers in behavioral oncology and cancer control research. Development of a successful transdisciplinary training program requires mentorship, research, and a specialized curriculum that encompass a broad range of disciplines. The program capitalizes on a unique set of existing and emerging training opportunities resulting from the collaborative activities of the IU Simon Cancer Center, the IU Schools of Nursing and Medicine, and multiple research institutes and academic centers located in Indiana and neighboring states.