Team Research

The Team Impact Award recognizes the critical contributions made by crosscutting teams in addressing today’s complex challenges. Specifically, the award recognizes a team for excellence in innovative and impactful scholarship that either has or soon promises to fundamentally advance knowledge, understanding and/or applications in ways not achievable by individual investigators or single disciplinary approaches alone.

Contact for questions:  Integrative Team Initiatives, Office of Research – research-teams@uga.edu.  

Award Description and Eligibility

• The Team Impact Award recognizes the critical contributions made by crosscutting teams in addressing today’s complex challenges. Specifically, the award recognizes a team for excellence in innovative and impactful scholarship that either has or soon promises to fundamentally advance knowledge, understanding, and/or applications in ways not achievable by individual investigators or single disciplinary approaches alone.
• Prize: The winning team will receive $5,000 for application in its research program.
• Eligible teams can be comprised of any disciplines, but must be composed of at least three distinct disciplines or subdisciplines.
• Eligible teams must be comprised of independent faculty each providing complementary interdisciplinary or subdisciplinary expertise, and each of whom has made separate substantive and discrete contributions in a novel manner to the project being recognized.
• Team members may belong to other organizations including academic institutions, and public or private sectors; however, the team must be led by a full-time UGA faculty member and the majority of team members must be from UGA.

Nomination Process

• The nomination letter must be from a UGA faculty member or administrator that is not a member of the team. Teams are encouraged to initiate discussions with potential nominators.
• Nominations will be submitted by the Team Leader through UGA’s InfoReady Portal via the Team Impact Award Nomination Form. 
• Final nominations must be submitted to the Office of Research via the UGA InfoReady site by November 1^st.

Nomination Materials

• All submissions must include the following:
  1. A 2- 3 sentence explanation/description of the team’s work and its impact suitable for the general public. (Form field)
  2. Nomination letter (maximum of three pages) which comprehensively describes the candidate team’s novel and significant work that has had, or is demonstrably on the path to leading to far-reaching impact. The letter must specifically outline the team’s work and substantive impact and emphasize specific features of the team’s efforts that represent innovative, high-functioning teamwork and synergy, and how these features have advanced both the project and their respective field(s).  The letter must clearly show how the integrative team efforts have resulted in outcomes much greater than the sum of those achievable from their individual contributions alone. Documentation that directly supports the mentioned accomplishments must be referenced. (UPLOAD)
  3. A list of all members of the team and their professional titles, affiliations and a description of each member’s role and what specific, enabling expertise they bring to the team and how their collaboration has enabled the team’s success (no more than 150 words for each member). Use the Excel template found here (and also found in the right-hand menu of the InfoReady submission form). (UPLOAD)
  4. Supporting documents, i.e., publications, brochures, examples of innovative teamwork or synergy, etc. (maximum of 5 pages total). (UPLOAD)

 Evaluation and Selection Process

• Nomination packages are reviewed by an interdisciplinary committee of faculty.
• Recommendations are provided to the Vice President for Research who makes the final selection.

Team Impact Award winners