The Translational Team Science Initiative (TTSI) at Illinois

Illinois Translational Team Science Initiative (TTSI)

As the progress of scientific discovery increasingly depends on large, interdisciplinary teams, national leaders have identified a critical gap in understanding what actually makes those teams effective for sustaining innovation, rigor, and impact in scientific research.

The Translational Team Science Initiative (TTSI) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign—a partnership among the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB), the Center for Social & Behavioral Science (CSBS), and the National Center for Principled Leadership & Research Ethics (NCPRE)—was created to address this gap and to respond to a 2025 NASEM Consensus Report, The Science and Practice of Team Science. That report calls for large-scale, comparative, multi-site research linking specific team practices and interventions to measurable scientific outcomes. It calls researchers to move beyond the preponderance of case-based evidence—much from business, not scientific settings—to develop datasets assessing the relationships between specific research teams’ work practices and performance outcomes.  

TTSI seeks to understand what makes science teams work and to use that information to provide practical hands-on guidance for participating teams. We also seek to contribute to understanding how to develop and support team science coaches effectively.

We will document and demonstrate how specific interventions improve the way teams function and how institutions can support those changes at scale. Our empirical research on science teams located within interdisciplinary institutes stands to be the largest multi-site comparative study of science institutes to date. This work will provide empirically grounded policy recommendations for which institutional resources make measurable differences in facilitating more effective teams. This targeted support fosters discoveries that address grand challenge issues and positions teams to secure interdisciplinary grants.