The mission of COLABS is to promote scientific collaborations in various institutional contexts through research, education and evaluation.
Research: This group’s research efforts focus on measuring and understanding culture of scientific collaborations, scientific teams or groups. The group looks at various dimensions that make a research group functional, productive, and innovative. We also study team cohesion, team productivity, and creativity by measuring individual scientists’ mindsets, motivations, identities, collaboration habits and emotional intelligence.
Other topics that interest this group include group leadership practices, epistemic, cognitive and social trust among team members and factors that contribute to team cohesion, a trust culture among members, creativity and productivity.
Training: We provide training for different collaboration units on and off campus to make scientific collaborations more effective endeavors. The focus of these trainings include: mindsets, team cohesion, team creativity, problem solving and innovation. Our team develops research based training materials and assessments for scientific collaborations of different sizes.
Diversity and inclusion training. We also provide diversity and inclusion training to different stakeholders.
Evaluation: We provide evaluation services to the scientific collaborations. Our team uses research-based instruments to evaluate different aspects of scientific collaborations and scientific teams on demand.