Glen D. Morgan

Evaluating transdisciplinary science.

The past two decades have seen a growing interest and investment in transdisciplinary research teams and centers. The Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Centers (TTURCs) exemplify large-scale scientific collaborations undertaken for the explicit purpose of promoting novel conceptual and methodological integrations bridging two or more fields. Until recently, few efforts have been made to evaluate the collaborative processes, and the scientific and public policy outcomes, of such centers. This manuscript offers a conceptual framework for understanding and evaluating transdisciplinary science and describes two ongoing evaluation studies covering the initial phase of the TTURC initiative. The methods and measures used by these studies are described, and early evaluative findings from the first 4 years of the initiative are presented. These data reveal progress toward intellectual integration within and between several of the TTURCs, and cumulative changes in the collaborative behaviors and values of participants over the course of the initiative. The data also suggest that different centers may follow alternative pathways toward transdisciplinary integration and highlight certain environmental, organizational, and institutional factors that influence each centers readiness for collaboration. Methodological challenges posed by the complexities of evaluating large-scale scientific collaborations (including those that specifically aspire toward transdisciplinary integrations spanning multiple fields) are discussed. Finally, new directions for future evaluative studies of transdisciplinary scientific collaboration, both within and beyond the field of tobacco science, are described.

Measuring collaboration and transdisciplinary integration in team science.

PURPOSE As the science of team science evolves, the development of measures that assess important processes related to working in transdisciplinary teams is critical. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to present the psychometric properties of scales measuring collaborative processes and transdisciplinary integration. METHODS Two hundred-sixteen researchers and research staff participating in the Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Centers (TTURC) Initiative completed the TTURC researcher survey. Confirmatory-factor analyses were used to verify the hypothesized factor structures. Descriptive data pertinent to these scales and their associations with other constructs were included to further examine the properties of the scales. RESULTS Overall, the hypothesized-factor structures, with some minor modifications, were validated. A total of four scales were developed, three to assess collaborative processes (satisfaction with the collaboration, impact of collaboration, trust and respect) and one to assess transdisciplinary integration. All scales were found to have adequate internal consistency (i.e., Cronbach alphas were all >0.70); were correlated with intermediate markers of collaborations (e.g., the collaboration and transdisciplinary-integration scales were positively associated with the perception of a centers making good progress in creating new methods, new science and models, and new interventions); and showed some ability to detect group differences. CONCLUSIONS This paper provides valid tools that can be utilized to examine the underlying processes of team science--an important step toward advancing the science of team science.

Assessing the Value of Team Science A Study Comparing Center- and Investigator- Initiated Grants

BACKGROUND Large cross-disciplinary scientific teams are becoming increasingly prominent in the conduct of research. PURPOSE This paper reports on a quasi-experimental longitudinal study conducted to compare bibliometric indicators of scientific collaboration, productivity, and impact of center-based transdisciplinary team science initiatives and traditional investigator-initiated grants in the same field. METHODS All grants began between 1994 and 2004 and up to 10 years of publication data were collected for each grant. Publication information was compiled and analyzed during the spring and summer of 2010. RESULTS Following an initial lag period, the transdisciplinary research center grants had higher overall publication rates than the investigator-initiated R01 (NIH Research Project Grant Program) grants. There were relatively uniform publication rates across the research center grants compared to dramatically dispersed publication rates among the R01 grants. On average, publications produced by the research center grants had greater numbers of coauthors but similar journal impact factors compared with publications produced by the R01 grants. CONCLUSIONS The lag in productivity among the transdisciplinary center grants was offset by their overall higher publication rates and average number of coauthors per publication, relative to investigator-initiated grants, over the 10-year comparison period. The findings suggest that transdisciplinary center grants create benefits for both scientific productivity and collaboration.

Grid-Enabled Measures Using Science 2.0 to Standardize Measures and Share Data

Scientists are taking advantage of the Internet and collaborative web technology to accelerate discovery in a massively connected, participative environment--a phenomenon referred to by some as Science 2.0. As a new way of doing science, this phenomenon has the potential to push science forward in a more efficient manner than was previously possible. The Grid-Enabled Measures (GEM) database has been conceptualized as an instantiation of Science 2.0 principles by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) with two overarching goals: (1) promote the use of standardized measures, which are tied to theoretically based constructs; and (2) facilitate the ability to share harmonized data resulting from the use of standardized measures. The first is accomplished by creating an online venue where a virtual community of researchers can collaborate together and come to consensus on measures by rating, commenting on, and viewing meta-data about the measures and associated constructs. The second is accomplished by connecting the constructs and measures to an ontological framework with data standards and common data elements such as the NCI Enterprise Vocabulary System (EVS) and the cancer Data Standards Repository (caDSR). This paper will describe the web 2.0 principles on which the GEM database is based, describe its functionality, and discuss some of the important issues involved with creating the GEM database such as the role of mutually agreed-on ontologies (i.e., knowledge categories and the relationships among these categories--for data sharing).

The Future of Tobacco-Control Research

Recent epidemiologic data on the stabilization of adult and youth smoking rates underscore the need for vigorous research across the cancer control spectrum on tobacco use interventions. The steady decline in adult rates of smoking has stalled for the first time in 8 years, and certain race, ethnic, and population groups are disproportionately at risk to tobacco-related cancers because of disparities in tobacco use or access to effective interventions. Although substantial progress has been made across levels of basic through applied research, tobacco-control research across the discovery and delivery continuum must be accelerated to further reduce the cancer burden. Following a brief review of the prevalence and trends affecting tobacco use initiation and cessation, we identify and describe four domains of extraordinary research opportunities: genetics and gene-environment interactions, bioinformatics and health informatics, disparities and disproportionate risk, and prevention and treatment. Evolutionary scientific changes, like rapidly advancing technology and emphasis on the paradigm of team science research approaches, provide both a challenge as well as unparalleled opportunities for scientific advancement and public health progress. (Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2007;16(6):1077–80)

Overview of the consortium of hospitals advancing research on tobacco (chart)

BackgroundThe Consortium of Hospitals Advancing Research on Tobacco (CHART) is a network of six projects and a research coordinating unit funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research. The CHART projects will assess the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of smoking cessation interventions initiated during hospitalization and continued post-discharge.Methods/designAlong with a seventh project funded previously under the NIH Challenge grants, the CHART projects will assess smoking cessation strategies delivered to approximately 10,000 hospitalized smokers across a geographically diverse group of nearly 20 private, public, academic, and community hospitals. The CHART research coordinating unit at Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research provides organizational and data coordination support, facilitating the development of common measures for combining data from multiple CHART projects.DiscussionThe targeted enrollment in CHART, if achieved, will represent the largest, most diverse pooled dataset of hospitalized smokers receiving smoking cessation assistance, and is designed to contribute to the dissemination and implementation of smoking cessation interventions provided by hospital systems.

The conception of the ABCD study: From substance use to a broad NIH collaboration

Adolescence is a time of dramatic changes in brain structure and function, and the adolescent brain is highly susceptible to being altered by experiences like substance use. However, there is much we have yet to learn about how these experiences influence brain development, how they promote or interfere with later health outcomes, or even what healthy brain development looks like. A large longitudinal study beginning in early adolescence could help us understand the normal variability in adolescent brain and cognitive development and tease apart the many factors that influence it. Recent advances in neuroimaging, informatics, and genetics technologies have made it feasible to conduct a study of sufficient size and scope to answer many outstanding questions. At the same time, several Institutes across the NIH recognized the value of collaborating in such a project because of its ability to address the role of biological, environmental, and behavioral factors like gender, pubertal hormones, sports participation, and social/economic disparities on brain development as well as their association with the emergence and progression of substance use and mental illness including suicide risk. Thus, the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study was created to answer the most pressing public health questions of our day.

Towards Next Generation Health Data Exploration: A Data Cube-Based Investigation into Population Statistics for Tobacco

Increasingly, experts and interested laypeople are turning to the explosion of online data to form and explore hypotheses about relationships between public health intervention strategies and their possible impacts. We have engaged in a multi-year collaboration to use and design semantic techniques and tools to support the current and next generation of these explorations. We introduce a tool, qb.js, to enable access to multidimensional statistical data in ways that allow non-specialists to explore and create specific visualizations of that data. We focus on explorations of health data - in particular aimed at helping to support the formation and analysis of hypotheses about public health intervention strategies and their correlation with health-related behavior changes. We used qb.js to formulate and explore the hypothesis that youth tobacco access laws have consistent, measurable impacts on the rate of change in cigarette smoking among high school students over time. While focused in this instance on one particular intervention strategy (i.e., limiting youth access to tobacco), this analytics platform may be used for a wide range of correlational analyses. To address this hypothesis, we converted population science data on tobacco-related policy and behavior from ImpacTeen to a Resource Description framework (RDF) representation that was annotated with the RDF Data Cube vocabulary. A Semantic Data Dictionary enabled mapping between the original datasets and the RDF representation. This allowed for the creation and publication of data visualizations using qb.js. The RDF Data Cube representation made it possible to discover a significant downward effect from the introduction of nine youth tobacco access laws on the rate of change in smoking prevalence among high school-aged youth.

Towards Semantically Enabled Next Generation Community Health Information Portals: The PopSciGrid Pilot

We describe an approach to developing next generation health information portals. This prototype portal was developed to address two complementary goals (1) design and create a site where people can explore potential relationships between selected health-related behaviors, policies, and demographic data (2) explore semantic web technologies and linked data as enabling technologies for next generation health informatics portals. Our multidisciplinary team includes population and behavioral scientists, social network scientists, statisticians, and computer scientists focused on creating innovative proof of concept applications that integrate complex health data in understandable and usable ways. Our semantic-web based framework allowed us to design exemplar community health portal applications, with an initial focus on tobacco-related health data such as smoking prevalence and tobacco policies (taxation and smoking bans). We describe our approach, two semantically-enabled tobacco-related applications, and discuss how this approach can be used in a broad spectrum of community health applications.

Translational medication development for nicotine addiction.

OBJECTIVE To review the current state of the science in medication development for nicotine dependence and to identify important areas for future research. METHODS The National Cancer Institute and the National Institute on Drug Abuse convened a conference focused on translational approaches to the development, evaluation, and delivery of medications for the treatment of tobacco dependence. RESULTS Future research directions include investigations of the efficacy of novel compounds and new applications for existing medications; pharmacogenetic trials of nicotine dependence treatments; and studies of the molecular, neural, and behavioral mechanisms of action of efficacious medications. CONCLUSIONS Medication development for the treatment of tobacco dependence remains a scientific and public health priority.