Tips on facilitating your multi-institution research grant

Overview: To assemble a team that can both author a high-quality grant proposal and complete the outlined research, faculty often need to reach across institutions. Having researchers from multiple institutions brings horsepower, but it also brings administrative headaches. Knowing this, many funding agencies ask investigators to describe how the research team will operate during the program—how it will be managed and how members will communicate and share data. However, there is little space in proposals for detailed plans and issues that arise often do not appear in these plans. For this post I brought some colleagues together to highlight some best practices for running a multi-institution project. The overarching suggestion was that investigators should expect the program to evolve!

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Contributors: Marian Kennedy, Lisa Benson, Courtney Faber and Rachel Kajfez

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If you were recently awarded a research grant, congratulations! You are about to engage in some challenging research and advance the knowledge of your field. In the contemporary funding landscape, there is a high probability that this new grant has a team of investigators working together, which requires effective collaboration. Thinking through what practices you want to put into place at the beginning of the program will minimize the impact of the minor bumps, such as personality conflicts, and larger barriers, such as investigators transitioning off and onto the grant (a situation I’ve encountered more than once in my career). Here are some key suggestions. Knowing this, many funding agencies ask investigators to describe how the research team will operate during the program—how it will be managed and how members will communicate and share data. However, there is little space in proposals for detailed plans and issues that arise often do not appear in these plans. Below are our six best practices to implement as your multi-site grant gets funded.

        (1)  Reread the proposal and it discuss as a team as soon as you find out about funding.

It has probably been at least four months since you and your team cowrote the proposal, so some of the finer points of the proposal such as the team management will be a little foggy. With limits on proposal length, some details are also not specified, and each contributor might have had different ideas about what those details should be when writing the proposal. Rereading the proposal should prompt discussion about those details as well as reminding everyone of the details that were spelled out in it. The discussion can be informal over coffee or one of the investigators can volunteer to give an overview presentation to the group. In either case, make sure that everyone feels comfortable in asking questions.

       (2) Carefully consider the communication tools your team will use.

With the many options for communication (electronic, phone or in person) the flow of information can almost be constant on a project. While that is wonderful in some ways, it can also limit the time researchers have to do their deep work. Therefore, we suggest that you strategize a communication method that prioritizes “thinking time” in addition to speed and face-to-face meetings. On one project, the team had open discussions about the tools (email, meetings, project management trackers, cloud documents for technical memos and research details, video chat), the purpose of each tool and the frequency of communication.

Here are some keys as you start:

• As a team, define what is most important about communication. Based on this discussion, identify, and invest in a project management software. Some software is great for quick communication (e.g., Slack), other software is great for organizing and communicating deadlines (e.g., Trello), and some platforms are multifunctional, providing quick communications, organization of deadlines, and file storage (e.g., Basecamp, Microsoft Teams). Most academic institutions do not have a site license for these types of programs. A really good comparison of possible options was “21 Best Project Management Tools For Research In 2022”.
• Clarify the responsibilities for each contributor and situations each one is responsible for “leading.” This can as a baton is passed between the collaborating faculty. One option might be to use a spreadsheet to create a table ofresponsibilities for each of the principal investigators, graduate researchers, and undergraduate researchers.  This will also help students know who to ask when issues arise.

     (3) Don’t meet just to meet.

Every meeting held has a cost, so you want to make sure that there is a purpose and outcome for any meeting.

We have found that a monthly “organizational and big picture” was always a key component of our programs. These meetings have every person on the project in attendance. When these meetings are held for multi-site projects, we suggest that each site gathered in a conference room or office and then used a single laptop to connect into the virtual meeting and these meetings included both administrative (hiring, scheduling, documenting, etc.) discussions and technical conversations (limits of theoretical frameworks, selection of items, etc.).

It is important to identify the agenda and take minute for each meeting. These documents can become extremely helpful when creating reports for funding agencies or revising why decisions were made. One option is for the meeting organizer to email the agenda to all team members prior to the meeting and at the start of the meeting to ask for any changes needed. As the meeting flows, the organizer can take minutes so that the decisions are clear and action items are always distributed to team members appropriately (email attachments and post in a shared “Meeting Agendas and Minutes” folder). Another option is to use a Google sheet to create meeting agendas for either a semester or year. Lisa has tried this previously and found it helpful to have all the milestones and deadlines identified. As the project progresses, the team can add or moving things around as needed. During the meeting, one person takes the meeting minutes and tags the action items within a Google doc. When any meeting begins, the organizer (typically the investigator hosting the meeting) pops links to these documents in the chat window. This process eliminates the need to send emails with minutes or agendas.

Maintaining the general management meeting once a month will allow for focused research-intensive meetings, site meetings or journal club meetings that occur on a more regular basis (such as biweekly). I had not utilized a journal club meeting for a program before it was suggested by Lisa. The journal clubs can be organized around a subject pinning the project such as “researcher identity” or “dislocation multiplication” and used to help all the PIs delve into both recently published articles in this area and foundational literature. We would suggest that every researcher on the project affiliate with one of the journal groups. 

As we all know, meetings in person and virtually can be different. Here are some tips for making sure that the quality of the virtual meetings is high. 

• Ensure that everyone has the necessary tools to keep sound quality high (headphones, high speed WIFI and a good microphone). 
• Send out all agendas in the calendar invites and keep a record within a shared folder on the cloud.
• Have one of the principal investigators take notes from the meetings, email them out to all participants, and then archive these minutes in a centralized data folder on the cloud.

        (4) Take time to discuss what requirements you have when selecting software and data storage.

Selecting the right software for collecting and analyzing data can save time, reduce costs, and increase collaboration between investigators at each site. As you wrote your grant, you probably identified the software that you wanted to utilize, but you should revisit the selection process after funding to ensure you consider options that have just been released or that have incorporated new updates. During those selection processes, you will balance a long list of factors such as features, cost, and ease of use. One that we initially did not consider was “potential capabilities”—that is, capabilities that might be needed. When working on an engineering education grant, we had identified types of software that we wanted to utilize for the quantitative data (online survey collection) and the qualitative data (recording of interviews, transcription, and coding). While we made a list of immediate requirements for the software that were needed during the proposal development phase, it would have been prudent to make a list of potential capabilities. In this instance, our team initially only considered our need for qualitative software for coding of themes from transcripts. It would have been helpful to consider additional challenges or opportunities during data collection which would have influenced our software decision. Had we planned, we would have chosen a software option that allowed us to track the emergence of themes based on demographics related to the participants (gender, institution type).

Finally, make sure to identify what Cloud system all members of the group can use. A single cloud system was needed to allow everyone to have access to data collection protocols, data analysis methodologies, and meeting minutes. Discussions around selection included allowing for personalized synchronizing (controlling data on PI laptops), cost, compatibility, institutional support, and internal review board approval. On one project, we ran across a problem that while each institution had free cloud-based storage for its employees, these did not allow for access from users outside the institution. Therefore, the investigators paid for a cloud-based system that allowed access for investigators from all the participating locations for shared documents and a second local system for the encrypted storage of identifiable data. 

        (5) Formally address authorship expectations rather than leaving it to naturally emerge.

With large teams, authorship of journal articles and conference proceedings can be difficult to determine since it is not always immediately clear which researchers made an intellectual contribution to the manuscript. Courtney Faber suggested we write a publication charter like her team had done as part of another multi-institution project (“Collaborative Research: Supporting Agency Among Early Career Engineering Education Faculty in Diverse Institutional Contexts” funded by the National Science Foundation). This document suggested that it was the responsibility for all project team members to mindfully opt in or opt out of a publication during the development stage and that the minimum work to be a coauthor would include both intellectual contribution and revising of the manuscript. We also found their suggestion to write out the responsibilities by author order helpful (first author is the person “in charge of submitting and leading writing,” second author could be “substantially involved in the analysis for a particular paper,” etc.). If you have not had experience with this, make sure to read Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT).

A topic that is often overlooked is how to handle authorship after a PI has left the project due to a transition to another institution and change of roles. This has occurred on multiple large group projects. We have all participated in those that teams have struggled with how to list authorship of that investigator when they had been critical to the proposal development (research question development and initial methods) but had left the project prior to significant data collection and subsequent analysis. We would suggest that you have an open conversation about this once a year on large projects. (In addition to faculty, undergraduate and graduate students also transitioned on and off larger projects, but in these situations, it is typically clearer how to handle the authorship of manuscripts.) 

        (6) Don’t be afraid to let the grant evolve from the original proposal when needed.

This is the most important thing! Many of us want to meet the objectives that was initially outlined in a proposal and have a hard time shifting when our analysis of data collected in an initial phase suggests that the one or more of the hypothesis or experimental plans. We also want the plan to go as written and can get thrown off if our expectations do not meet with reality. 

• Change will happen. Take time to reflect on the changes in project facilitation, data management, etc. to make sure that the framework meets the needs of the team members every six months. Reflect on whether scope changes are necessary to meeting project objectives or are outside the scope of the current project.
• When a team member leaves the project, it is important to find someone who can contribute to the project, but it is not necessary (or possible!) to find a carbon copy of the researcher who moved on.
• The regularity of the meetings should change as needed; in our experience it averages out to about once a year for each of these three types. Reasons for these changes tend to align with changing phases in the project.

About the contributors: Dr. Lisa Benson is a full professor within the Clemson University Engineering and Science Education Department. Her research focuses on the interactions between student motivation and their learning experiences, and she is the immediate past editor for the Journal of Engineering Education.   Dr. Courtney Faber is a Research Associate Professor within the Engineering Fundamentals Program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.  She explores how fundamental beliefs about knowledge and knowing create barriers.  Dr. Rachel Kajfez is an associate professor at the Ohio State University Department of Engineering Education. Her research interests focus on the intersection between motivation and identity of undergraduate and graduate students.

Five tips on facilitating an academic research group for new faculty

 

Overview: While I was part of a larger research group during graduate school, I did not mindfully consider how that group was structured to encourage communication, professional development, and research productivity. It seemed to me that everyone just thrived in that research group, and we never discussed a need for ‘pixie dust’ or new formats to the group structure, so I assumed that I could “run” a research group after earning my PhD that would be just as effective. I also assumed that my style could simply be a mirror of my advisor and that his style would work for me. Being a member of his group was a wonderful experience and so, I reasoned that if I donned his leadership style students in my research group would also have a wonderful experience. Neither of those assumptions turned out to be true. Thankfully, I had great students who rolled with it as I attempted to find my rhythm, structure and style. When it became evident that either I or my group members needed something different, I tried to find new operation methods and then ran a trial for at least one semester.  I reached out to colleagues who graciously shared some of their best practices and by assembling these I have found my (current) structure. This post highlights some of the key suggestions that I incorporated along with suggestions from my colleagues John Ballato and Thompson Mefford.

Here are five simple tips to help your research group get off the ground or reset the culture and productivity of an existing group. While a research group must have a clear mission, it must also have clear lines of communication between all members and a culture that encourages diving into the foundational literature of the group’s research focus. Based on our experience, we would recommend:

·       Set expectations for what being part of the research group will be like.

·       Consider having each group member submit a weekly email summarizing their productivity and plans for the coming week to you (the lead investigator). 

·       Have a weekly group meeting in addition to individual meetings with students in your research group.

·       Ask students to develop semester research plans and submit them to you.  Ask for revisions until you are in agreement on those plans.  Then return to this at end of each term to make sure student is on the expected path.

·       Create a culture of continuous reading and discussing.

·       Put time in your schedule for learning and implementing good management techniques. 

 

The paragraphs below expand on these ideas.

 

(1)  Set expectations for each student joining the research group.

While incoming students have probably talked to peers about research and gotten some information during an initial interview, we would strongly encourage you to set up a welcome email that highlights general expectations.  These emails can gently remind students that they are most likely joining the handful of groups in the world working in this area and that this entry comes with some general expectations. Thompson and John send emails to their new students that highlight several key concepts:

·      Each student is a reflection of the group and their research advisor on and off of the main campus. 

·      The lead investigator (advisor) is responsible for providing resources, but not there to do the work for the students in the research group. 

·      That degrees are earned by merit and not based on time completing research or enrolled at an institution.  Students earn degrees based on new knowledge they create from generated data and the analysis of those results. 

·      Research is research precisely because the study has not been done before, so students need to be patient and diligent. Have a purpose or hypothesis behind every experiment even if that purpose is to test whether something won’t work. There is something to learn from every experiment as long as its thought-out beforehand. Reframing “success” in terms of learning something new helps off-set the fact that most experiments will fail in the sense that they do not result in the expected outcome. 

·      There are no substitutes for being in the lab, at the library, or writing. Because the student is part of a select experimental research group, it is expected that they will spend a substantial fraction of their productive time in the lab. They must own their research project and are responsible for conducting a close examination of the literature.  Both groups highlight that two hours in the library could save the student two weeks in the lab. 

·      A research group is a team and that through collective efforts the group will achieve great things.  Be a good team member.

·      For a research groups to be at the top, it means that the group must lead through results and that other research groups will follow these initial results.   This can only be achieved by all students in the group working hard and having a constant sense of urgency. 

 

(2)   Emails describing accomplishments from the prior week and aims for the next week.

We have found that having students send us weekly updates helps the entire Group stay organized. Receiving such emails on Friday prompts us to reflect on each member of the group’s trajectory and to make slight modifications to get them aimed closer to their research targets. To make it easy on the group members, I (Dr. Kennedy) have provided a template for the students that describes what should be emailed to me. Over time, I have added two small additions that ask students to highlight any roadblocks they have and identify their next meetings to ensure everything is on my calendar correctly. Below is some of the text from this template that you might find useful. 

 

Research Completed This Week: This section should include work done during the week that aligns with the project. You might have read research papers, outlined experiments, collected data, analyzed data, etc. In all cases, you should try to include a summary of what you did. If you read a paper, send a paragraph along with the citation. If you collected data, send the plot of the data. 

Research to Be Completed Next Week: This section should include all the tasks that you hope to accomplish next week. You can absolutely bullet point these. Please try to have specific goals, such as reading and summarizing 1-2 journal articles related to the wear of high entropy alloys, instead of just stating that you plan to read journal articles.

Roadblocks or Deadlines: In this section, highlight any issues that you need help from Dr. Kennedy on. This includes finding the right staff person, ordering supplies, etc. You should also use this section to update Dr. Kennedy on upcoming deadlines. Some weeks, you will just indicate that there are no roadblocks or upcoming deadlines. 

Next Meeting: Indicate when your next meeting is planned with Dr. Kennedy or other group members. 

 

A tip that I picked up from John Ballato was to send a running list to all the group members so that they could see what other researchers were doing each week. This increased synergy between students in the lab who were not working on the same projects. It also allows students in the Group to help each other out if they happen to be, for example, running equipment that week that could also benefit someone else’s research.

 

(3)   Weekly group meetings with all members of your research group encourage direct communication between all team members instead of always channeling through the lead investigator. 

John Ballato established a Monday morning group meeting by borrowing the Swedish tradition of “Fika.” Fika involves coffee, a little something to eat (like sweet pastries) and time to catch up with colleagues. It is different than just having a “coffee” break because it is a group activity, and no one can just sit at their desk. With a large research group, the students and postdoctoral researchers have many projects running in parallel. This meeting allows the team members to learn about the projects they are not on and to see the synergy between their work and others in the group. In larger teams, it is not always easy for students to see who they can get help from or where they can work in parallel with others on basic fabrication or characterization steps. 

 

(4)    Have your students create a research plan for each semester.

This idea that came from my colleague Thompson Mefford. He showed me this technique when he joined Clemson back in 2009. The student is asked to first think about and complete the document and then modify it after discussions the group leader and their peers. Since there are often changes over the course of each student’s time in our research groups, we ask that the plan be updated each term. We remind students to continually modify the document to reflect changes in the research hypothesis or expected milestones. We encourage our group members to keep a folder on a network with documents from each semester and keep a printed copy in their laboratory notebook. Below are key parts of my group’s current planning document.

 

Name: (First and last name)

Date: (Last revision date of this form)

Degree Sought: (BS, MS, MEng or PhD and associated program)

Predicted Graduation: (month/year)

Long-Term Career Goals: Where will you be and what are you doing after graduate school. You might say that you want to work at a national laboratory as a scientist in ten years. This might require completing your undergraduate research project with your advisor and then applying to graduate school.

Thesis, Dissertation or Undergraduate Research Project: What your research objective or research hypothesis is. You should also include a few sentences about how you are approaching it (computational, laboratory experiments, etc.). 

Recent accomplishments: What new data or knowledge have you generated n the last month? An example might be “Cleaned data from survey of researchers and adhered to IRB protocols.”

Goals for current semester: Provide a list of goals for rest of this semester, including research objectives and mentoring. Be specific. You can add more numbers as needed. These should align with your stated research hypothesis or research objective stated earlier OR your career plans. Anything that does not align should not be a goal. An example might be “Measure the mechanical properties of chitosan deposited with plasma method using the nanoindenter located in Sirrine Hall Rm. G52.”

Milestones: Provide a list of milestones for rest of this semester, including research objectives and mentoring. Be specific. You can add more numbers as needed. These should align with your stated goals above. Anything that does not align should not be a milestone. Also, I use the numbering system to show how these relate to the goals above. An example might be “Ensure that the nanoindenter is calibrated by testing standard of fused quartz and comparting to published results.”  

List collaborations with other groups: I ask students to keep a running list of the internal and external collaborators they will be working with on a project. For example, a student may be getting samples made by a collaborator at a local manufacturing facility in Greenville, SC. The bullet point would include the contact’s name and how they are affiliated with the project. 

 

(5)   Creating a culture of continuous reading of literature

I (Dr. Kennedy) had the opportunity to collaborate with faculty in the Clemson Engineering and Science Education department and one of the things that I most enjoyed was how they institutionalized reading of journal papers. Lisa Benson, a professor in Engineering and Science Education at Clemson, was one of the proponents of this practice. The department makes it clear that graduate students should be reading at least 2-3 research papers per week. To help, the students and faculty collectively read one paper together each week and discuss it during their Friday afternoon student organized “lunch and learn.” Two graduate students in the department are responsible for choosing the papers (based on peer suggestions) and facilitating the paper discussions as everyone eats their lunch. This group discussion helps everyone increase their knowledge of basic experimental methods (such as Likert scale development), understand the implications of research study findings by hearing how others integrate them into their findings, and gain a larger understanding of the research landscape of their field beyond their own research project. If your department is large, meeting with two to three other research groups at your institution instead of the whole department may be advantageous. Or start a journal group with a group working on similar work at a different institution. 

 

One of the suggestions that I received from John was to use these meetings to also help teach students about the writing style of our field.  He points out to his students when he does or doesn’t like how a paper is structured or written.  This can lead into discussions about what questions the students might have wanted to ask the authors if they were reviewers during the evaluation of the paper. 

 

(6)    Educate yourself on how to work with and motivate others towards the shared research vision

Over your career you will be lucky enough to work with people driven to pursue their own research interests and not jump to pursue your vision just because you ask them to. You will need to gain the skills to engage collaborators and motivate them towards a shared vision. Yolanda Gil eloquently identified this essential component of running a research group as “learning to work with others” (see “Ten Simple Rules for Starting a Research Group” by in AI Matters 2014). She also highlighted that this was not necessarily a skill that you developed as a graduate student or post doc, so it typically is a skill that is developed through informal educational routes such as reading, observing your best collaborators to identify their practices, or intentional reflection on your experiences to find best practices. In her article, she outlined some common-sense starting points:

·       Take the time to listen and observe your group members. 

·       Approach collaborators on how they will benefit from the research work they are doing.

·       Provide a timeline for work to be completed and help them understand they urgency of any deadlines. 

·       Lead by example by meeting the set deadlines or letting everyone know that the deadline will need to be shifted and when to expect data to be completed. 

·       Provide a plan for each of your group members to grow their research skills. Each group member will have strong skills and areas for improvement. 

About Dr. Ballato: John Ballato is a professor of materials science and engineering at Clemson University, where he also holds the J. E. Sirrine Endowed Chair in Optical Fiber. He has published nearly 500 technical papers and holds 35 U.S. and foreign patents. He is a Fellow of the American Ceramic Society (ACerS), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American Physical Society (APS), the Optical Society of America (OSA), and the International Society of Optical Engineering (SPIE), as well as an elected member of the World Academy of Ceramics and the U.S. National Academy of Inventors. . You can find out more about his research here (Wikipedia).

About Dr. Mefford: Thompson Mefford is the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies in the Clemson College of Engineering, Computing and Applied Sciences. He earned his PhD in Macromolecular Science and Engineering in 2007 from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, then completed a postdoc with the Ohio State University Department of Chemistry. His research focuses on developing stable, biocompatible polymer-metal oxide nanoparticle complexes and composites for biomedical, environmental, and energy applications. You can learn more about his research here (Google Scholar).