Keeping the Team Together Posted on November 30, 2007 Possessing complementary skill sets is important for a research team, states Charles L. Bowden (bio).

One of the strengths of our center is that, over time, the word "center" is not just a convenient euphemism; it does a mean a center. Hopefully, it means a center physically, but it certainly means a center conceptually.

So if you have senior research coordinators who have learned the ropes of how to meaningfully, ethically meeting all of the complex, actually, federal guidelines about ethical conduct of human research. If you have all those people in place, if you have people who know how to coordinate the data that you gather from your instruments, your rating scales or your computer-based testing, whatever it is that you're doing, to put those into a database.

If you've got the statistical people who understand not just about a formula for a test, that's pretty easy with computers these days, but the choices of the approaches to the analysis of the data and how the data are maintained in a database. All of those represent strengths, so once you get that team together, you hope to keep them together. We recently, lost is maybe the wrong word, but one of the senior people in our team, as it were, was recruited away.

So you try to put together a team just as a coach for an NFL or an NBA team would be endeavoring to put together and have these people with these different skill sets that are complementary.

We have formal meetings in our center of an executive committee once a month, of all of the participating scientists once a month. Mostly that's to keep up with the projects that we already are working on, but in some instances there might be an outside consultant who would have a role.

Or we might talk about, for example, the center application, which we just made for this P30 mechanism. That meant working with people with, in a way, a different lifestyle and culture. They'd say the same thing about us.

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