TRAINING RESEARCHERS TO THINK ABOUT TEAM SCIENCE

Jennifer Iriti

As assistant vice chancellor for research inclusion and outreach strategy and a research scientist in the Learning Research and Development Center, Jennifer Iriti aims to build a community at Pitt that can foster new, convergent research training opportunities. Iriti wants to focus on building an architecture that can support researchers who are experts in one area to find areas of convergence with experts from other disciplines. 

“Researchers who have intersectional and interdisciplinary mindsets are really valuable because they can think about and engage in research in ways that allow them to address some of our society’s most intractable problems,” says Iriti. 

In the past, multidisciplinary researchers came to be because of their own interests, but what if we could train them from the start in this way? Rather than putting the onus on individual faculty to think about these possibilities, Iriti and Pitt leadership have started to build the infrastructure and the culture of bringing leaders together to engage more strategically to identify areas ripe for convergence research training at Pitt.

“We’re creating an incubator space where these ideas can flourish,” says Iriti. “Doing this will help increase our collaboration across schools and departments and create more linkages between people interested in this type of traineeship.” 

A goal of this project is for Pitt to successfully obtain a National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) grant. The NRTs support interdisciplinary work that helps advance the training of graduate students in research-based programs. An NRT grant would allow for further development and enhancement of the interdisciplinary training Pitt aims to make the standard. 

Given the amount of money received versus the amount of work required for an NRT, Pitt is trying to change how the grants are approached at an institutional level by providing financial and intellectual support for faculty and school or department leaders with promising ideas. Additionally, leadership is working together to identify faculty who would best be equipped to apply for this funding. By coming at it from a more strategic and coordinated way than in the past, Iriti hopes to set Pitt apart in its capacity to leverage institutional strengths for innovative and convergent areas of research and training.