Cross-Discipline Teams Posted on November 21, 2007 Working across disciplines is very important in biomedical research, states Joachim F. Hallmayer (bio).

Working across disciplines is nowadays one of the most important things in biomedical research. There’s actually no doubt that everything we are doing is interdisciplinary. And there is unfortunately a little bit — the universities are lagging a little bit behind, I think, in acknowledging that this is the model because the university model or the academic model is still built on the premise there is this one guy who does this and is very, very good in this one area and is basically this huge individual.

And so, basically, medical persons have to work with PhDs and vice versa, and this, as we all know, is not always [easy]. So developing, let’s say, an idea how to collaborate I think is nowadays very important early on. It’s also very important to figure out, “Where do I stand as a starter, basically? If I start new, where do I stand in the collaborations? What are my expectations? On the other hand, what do I have to bring to the table or what do I have to give back?"

And to negotiate, this is probably one of the most difficult things, especially for beginners. And very, very often the expectations are too high, or sometimes also people are taken advantage of. So it goes in both directions. There are many young researchers who expect too much to get out of a collaboration, and then they basically expect immediately to be first author on publications and so on and so on, which can be very, very difficult to negotiate, especially if it’s a large collaboration.

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