Three-part strategy

As its name implies, the BioFoundry will focus on three activities to spread the gospel of glycoscience: resources, education, and training, all to be made available to collaborators and clients through a dedicated user facility that will be based at CCRC. The first component—resources—capitalizes on the center’s world-renowned collection of research talent. The idea is to leverage CCRC’s research and technology development to provide better tools for new and aspiring glycoscientists to use in their work.

For example, enzymes are critical to the formation and structure of glycans. Kelley Moremen has spent decades studying the biochemistry, structure, and regulation of enzymes involved in the creation of glycoproteins. One of the resources BioFoundry will make available are those very enzymes.

“We’ve focused historically on mammalian enzymes,” said Moremen, Distinguished Research Professor at CCRC, “but now with the BioFoundry, we have a mandate to expand that to an all-species space, from bacteria to plants to microbes—basically all of biology—to understand the enzymes involved in glycan production, how they work, and what are the types of structures they make.”

Moremen, Wells, and CCRC Assistant Professor Breeanna Urbanowicz also will work with Professor Natarajan Kannan, Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Scholar, to create computational resources that use artificial intelligence and machine learning to exponentially expand what is possible in carbohydrate research. Kannan is a member of the UGA Institute of Bioinformatics, and both he and Urbanowicz have appointments in the Franklin College of Arts & Sciences’ Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

Investigators, assemble

Like superheroes, research teams all have their own origin stories. Some are the product of a single researcher’s vision, made real through an evangelistic determination. Others emerge organically from a group of investigators with a common interest in a problem, and still others form as spinoffs to an existing effort.

For associate professors Jenay Beer and Lisa Renzi-Hammond, co-directors of UGA’s Cognitive Aging Research and Education (CARE) Center, their project was born in a single conversation that took physical form and became part of the College of Public Health’s décor.

“One day we were sitting in a conference room and talking about our shared personal history of dementia in our families,” Beer said. “Lisa and I are very visual people, and the room had these big, glass windows, so we took our markers and started drawing on the glass walls our idea of a clinic and research space. I like to think it was a very ‘Beautiful Mind’ moment. That diagram stayed on the wall for two years!”

“We might have been a little bummed when someone finally cleaned the glass,” Renzi-Hammond added.

Brian Bledsoe, on the other hand, arrived at UGA in 2016 from Colorado State University with a mission.

“I was very happy and satisfied where I was, but when the opportunity came along, I saw tremendous potential at UGA for this kind of institute,” said Bledsoe, Athletic Association Professor in the College of Engineering and director of the Institute for Resilient Infrastructure Systems. “I spent that first year having conversations with folks from over a dozen academic units across campus with interest and expertise in resilience and water and infrastructure, and [what became IRIS] grew out of a small group of faculty spanning all these disciplines: engineering, ecology, economics, social science, law and policy, landscape architecture and many others.”

Yet another type of backstory lies behind Mark Tompkins’ team. Tompkins, Athletic Association Distinguished Professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine, had been an investigator with the Emory-UGA Center for Excellence in Influence Research and Surveillance, and he had aspirations of launching a similar program based in Athens when he assembled a team to apply for a Presidential Interdisciplinary Seed Grant in the first cohort in 2017.

Initially focused on the impact of microbial diversity on respiratory disease, Tompkins’ team ended up splitting into (at least) two different thrusts: One, led by Tompkins and Regents’ and Georgia Athletics Association Professor Pej Rohani in the Odum School of Ecology, developed a proposal that eventually became the Center for Influenza Disease and Emergence Research (CIDER), funded in 2021 by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for seven years and up to $92 million.

The other, led by Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar Ted Ross, resulted in the largest single federal award in UGA’s history: One of NIH’s Collaborative Influenza Vaccine Innovation Centers was awarded to Ross and his team, to the tune of up to $130 million over seven years.

“Research teams are living, dynamic things,” Hornak said. “It’s not a linear process of moving from one program to the next in a rigid, defined order. Often you’re connecting smaller teams together, and this collection of teams—or what’s termed a ‘multi-team’—may hit upon different catalysts and end up moving in particular, different directions.”

Optimizing your team

Forming the team, of course, is merely a first step in changing the world. Teams are made up of individuals, each having their own priorities and collaborative style. Aside from the ground-level tasks of getting the actual work done, the team must be managed—and that can be a demanding task. Research on team science also shows there is an optimal team size for a given project yet no exact formula for how to arrive at it, just best practices to serve as a guide.

So how does a leader balance the value of adding more talent versus the unwieldiness of managing a larger team?

“Often when forming research teams, people are so worried about delivering the end product that they don’t think about who they’re working with or how they’re working with them,” said Karen Burg, vice president for research. “Intra-team dynamics are incredibly important to the team’s success. I liken it to a obstacle course challenge run, where teams compete but the team members on each team work with each other to overcome obstacles. It takes the talents of each team member and their willingness to collaborate, identifying each other’s talents and thinking creatively, in order for the team members to successfully cross the finish line together.”

UGA now offers a range of options to help its faculty become better leaders (and members) of research teams. In addition to assisting team formation, the modest financial awards available through the Teaming for Interdisciplinary Research (TIR) Pre-Seed Program allow newly formed groups to get to know each other and begin formative activities that help build strong working relationships among the team.

The small level of discretionary funding provided by the TIR Pre-Seed Program can be enabling not only for team formation but also for proposal success, especially when received at the opportune time. Tompkins’ CIDER proposal was nudged along by exactly this kind of support.

“We used it to hold a meeting near the Atlanta airport so people could fly in,” he said. “We supported everyone getting together in the conference room of a hotel for the evening before and then nine hours the next day, and we fleshed out the outline of the contract we were going to submit. If we hadn’t gotten those resources, we wouldn’t have been able to do it. It was transformative in the sense that it created a lot of ideas.”

Indeed, proposal development is at the heart of UGA’s team research support. For years OPE has helped investigators—particularly those working on very large proposals—make their bids as strong and airtight as possible. In 2021, Hornak’s group launched its Major Integrative Proposal Planning (MIPP) award, which pulls in OPE’s existing services and provides additional resources for an even more robust grant proposal planning and development process that starts much earlier.

The MIPP program works with the PI and their unit to give an investigator time to concentrate on proposal development. Large integrative center proposals, including research workforce, outreach and innovation components, can take two years or more to produce a proposal. MIPP provides resources for professional project management of that process, as well as for facilitating a “red team” of external reviewers to offer input on the proposal draft.

“We look for people with deep disciplinary knowledge but also a broader view of how that discipline connects to others,” Hornak said. “What we found to be most helpful is if the team lead has a professional network who we can select the red team from people who have a passion for the topic and are committed to giving strong, constructive criticism. That’s the sweet spot.”

Working to success

One of the biggest barriers to either forming or joining a team, Hornak said, is overcoming the notion that team research will add countless hours to a faculty member’s workload. He said working in a team does take more effort but also pays great dividends both professionally and personally. There’s no question that leading a research team comes with additional work, and he said the key is for leaders to build a strong core team whom they trust and can delegate to leveraging their unique strengths and passions. Investing the time up front to form that trusted core team will enhance—even multiply—the effectiveness of the team and allow for greater impact.

“It definitely has been a lot of work,” Beer said of launching the CARE Center. “But our goal as we grow and bring on more people is not to add to their plate, but to figure out how they can fit what they’re already doing into this existing, large research program.

“One thing that has helped is thinking about the public health problem with a really large lens,” she continued. “Let’s take diet and nutrition. What you eat that is good for your heart is also good for your brain; so with folks who are doing research in cardiovascular health, that applies to dementia health, as well. We’re not bringing on team members and urging them to change their trajectories or research programs—there’s a lot that fits under this large umbrella.”

“We do hear from some faculty who ask whether UGA still emphasizes and values individual work, and we absolutely do,” Hornak said. “What we’re doing is urging people to look around and see what larger effort their individual work might fit into, so that the proverbial whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

For those research teams that are well thought out, well formed and well trained, there can be considerable returns. The financial ROI is just one metric. Over the first three cohorts of the Presidential Interdisciplinary Seed Grants, awards were made to 30 teams comprising some 329 individuals. As of mid-2023, more than 170 scholarly publications had emerged from those teams, along with nearly 400 research presentations.

And, of course, there is the ultimate payoff: impact. Progress toward a broadly effective flu vaccine, as well as improving our understanding the nature of seasonal flu infection and developing better plans for the next pandemic, continue under the CIDER and CIVIC awards. IRIS researchers work on mitigating the impact of flood events through more widespread use of natural infrastructure. And every day the CARE Center welcomes new dementia patients and their families, connecting them with the diagnostic, therapeutic and caregiving resources they need.

“It goes back to being at a land-grant university,” Bledsoe said. “We’re inherently oriented toward the improvement of people’s lives. IRIS faculty are here in part because they have that commitment to the greater good, and they know enough to know they can’t achieve that without a lot of collaboration.”

“I have not yet met a UGA faculty member who heard about CARE and didn’t say, ‘Cool, can I help?’” Renzi-Hammond said. “Our goal is not just to make something that serves Georgia and the university. Once this is all built, once the model is tried and true, any land-grant university in the country should be able to do it as well.”

Why does it make strategic sense for UGA to offer support for team research projects?

There are many large and complicated problems that sponsors want to solve, and the problem doesn’t give a hoot about the disciplines it takes. It’s tackling the problem that matters. Solving those problems requires an interdisciplinary team approach, one that transcends and cuts across different boundaries and makes people work together to address the problem.

And we’re talking about problems like climate change, seasonal flu infection, sustainable transportation—grand challenges like that?

Yes, all of which people are very familiar with. If you pick any problem, there’s really a whole set of interconnected issues that contribute to it—and that must be addressed in a holistic way to solve it. People have heard about cybersecurity or cyber systems, quantum computing, things like that. Guess what? That’s not just a computer or computer chip—it’s a whole network of activity. They’re very cross-cutting, and if you don’t treat them holistically, you end up with solutions that may serve a particular function but don’t fit together to address the challenges of the whole system.

What have your priorities been as AVP for integrative team initiatives, and have they changed since you first stepped into the role?

I don’t know that they’ve necessarily changed, but perhaps they’ve evolved based on seeing what the needs were. I believe UGA faculty are very collaborative. They work together naturally. But this notion of leading larger teams and providing those team leaders and members with support—both in terms of professional development as well as financial support through seed programs—that’s been the focus. As well as providing support systems, things like project management support or red team review of their proposals.

Having world-class research is fundamental to large project competitiveness, but it is not enough. It needs to be integrated coherently, not only across disciplines, but also with workforce development, inclusivity, innovation and outreach activities to achieve the project’s vision. These can’t just be bolted on; they have to be really tightly knit and grown along with the world-class research from the very start. We’ve got to start working with faculty and their units really early—three years, five years in advance. If your goal is to go for one of these large, federally funded centers, whether it be NIH, NSF, USDA or DoD, then you have to be planning that far in advance and building the necessary foundational efforts and relationships.

With the Presidential Interdisciplinary Seed Grants, we’re having those projects work with something called the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative (TDI) at Michigan State University. Within the first couple months of their award, they work with them to form a firm foundation of what direction they’re going to go in and how it’s going to coalesce. In the 2023 seed grant round, we’re also requiring they plan a translation path for their work early on.

Seed grant recipients are encouraged to work with that program?

Yes. They must, actually. It’s in the solicitation. They will commit $4,000 of their award to do that. And there’s a method to this. That particular group is one of a handful nationally used by NSF and other federal agencies when they form big centers. So when our Presidential Interdisciplinary Seed Grant awardees subsequently submit larger proposals, we advise them, to make sure they mention that they’ve had this training. In doing so, they are increasing confidence on the part of the sponsor that an investing in a team is going to deliver—because many teams of complex projects fall short

Is there an order or an ideal arrangement of how these different types of support programs work together?

Well, first, people should know it’s not necessarily a linear process—if you get a pre-seed, you don’t necessarily go after a Presidential Interdisciplinary Seed Grant. What we’ve found is, because of that collaborative nature I mentioned, many times people who form a pre-seed may know somebody they collaborate with, one or two people, and then those people may collaborate separately with somebody else, so there is an opportunity for that original principal investigator (PI) to bring those two sub-teams together. We’ve found that often it’s not a bunch of individuals coming together, but rather pairs or groups of three. So you’re basically forming larger teams by connecting smaller teams.

Then what often happens is they get together, they have great conversations, and some subset of that group goes off and does something with even other folks. Again, it’s a living, dynamic thing. It grows in different directions.

What are some misperceptions about UGA’s push into integrative team research?

We do hear things saying, “Well, we’re not emphasizing individual work anymore,” and that’s not true. We’re basically talking about helping that proverbial whole to be greater than the sum of its parts, which is what sponsors always seek with large teams. Usually the challenge for faculty is, “I want to do that, but I don’t want to lead it.” If we can provide the support for faculty to feel comfortable leading these projects, that’s going to create a lot more opportunity. For every effective leader we can help enable, there will be great faculty who would be willing to join them.

The Presidential Interdisciplinary Seed Grants and the pre-seed program have covered quite a bit on campus. What are some other programs or developments that are less well known?

One thing is the Research Training Support Group. Several of the federal agencies like NSF and NIH have training grants for supporting graduate students. These grants are critical to workforce development and also for faculty to competitively recruit the best students. The Research Training Support Group is a collaborative effort between the Office of Research, the Graduate School and the Office of Institutional Diversity. It’s a collaboration, because blending those three elements are key to any successful training grant. We know that faculty needed help to go after training grants, so we are trying to provide more up-front support for those types of activity.

What are the most common challenges faculty face when they’re trying to put a team together?

Probably most common is just being able to get people’s time. Faculty leaders need a compelling vision of what they’re trying to do, of what people will contribute for a proposal, and the bigger picture of what they’re trying to build. That helps attract team members, but the leader also has to put themselves in the shoes of the people they’re asking to join and find out what they’re interested in. That’s why the pre-seed program is so important; you get to know the people (if you don’t know them already) and what they value.

Any parting advice for faculty thinking about leading large team efforts?

Start early. Start with a working group and begin to build a core group of trusted individuals with whom you can share responsibilities. It’s a matter of shared value; you try to structure the team so that everybody’s getting value out. To achieve that shared value, develop a collaboration plan or team charter with your group. They go a long way towards building a firm foundation for a cohesive and resilient team. And don’t forget to reach out to us early to help!