A: I'm involved in several multi-site studies, and there are advantages to that, but there are also challenges. You get a lot of input from all the various players, and if you multiply that by input from NIH, the IRB, and the Data and Safety Monitoring Board, what happens is that you have multiple compromises, and your individuality can get lost. What might have made your project unique, imaginative, idiosyncratic, is missing. Sometimes the input can improve the study, of course, but if you have 40 people having some say in the study, then basically you have an index fund; you're not going to be ahead of the curve, you may not make any bad mistakes, but in the end, I think the product can be somewhat pedestrian and standard, although sometimes that is what is needed.

You shouldn't get into a multi-site study if you don't know who you're going to work with, and you understand the rules and regulations. Are decisions made by consensus, or by voting? Does one group have more power than another to make certain decisions?

Even if you have been working in a team in the past, it's always important to be upfront about the process each time you embark on a new study. It's incredibly important for a young person to understand rules and roles if they're going to work closely with other researchers because it's quite intimate. You're tied together by the study, and it's not easy to get a divorce because the children are the data. So my advice is, know your collaborators; know their culture, and have some discussion on how you will make decisions together.