UC San Diego Chancellor’s Interdisciplinary Team Catalyst Award Program
The Team Catalyst Award program is a great example of how funding can catalyze the interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral co-leadership relationships that are needed for new HIBAR projects.
A brief description of the Team Catalyst Award program
The Team Catalyst Awards aim to foster sustainable, interdisciplinary collaborations and to assist teams in developing tailored funding strategies for grand scientific and societal challenges. The grants are not intended to fund research activities but rather to support early-stage team building activities to advance collaborative partnerships, and to support the teams in developing concrete plans to seek external funding to support the research.
The Team Catalyst Awards will function as an internal funding source to support the creation and sustainability of team-based research projects over a 2-to-5-year horizon. Proposals are required to outline a compelling research direction that requires integrated, multidisciplinary expertise, and present a milestone-based plan with clear goals. The awards are geared towards teams that can build on university strengths and demonstrate how the funding will enhance their competitiveness in pursuing external funding beyond single-investigator awards.
The program was first launched in January 2024, aimed at awarding 2-year grants ranging from $30k-$75k to 4-6 teams. The awards are managed as cooperative agreements with the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, and each team is assigned a point person to work with to track milestones and to coordinate any support they might need to implement their activities.
This program aligns directly with UCSD’s institutional goals for growing research growth via interdisciplinary institutes and centers. This program aims to bridge gaps between disciplines and more general supports institutional goals related to high impact research, people and purpose, and community partnerships.
The Team Catalyst Award encourages cross-sectoral co-leadership and shared decision-making:
The program currently focuses broadly on catalyzing interdisciplinary co-leadership among faculty members in different academic departments rather than explicitly focusing on cross-sectoral co-leadership, but the program can be easily adapted and tailored to focus on cross-sectoral partnerships. The types of team-building activities that are core to the program – team science training, developing collaboration plans, facilitating meetings to develop shared understanding and vision etc. – are equally applicable for building cross-sectoral teams.
These programs directly contribute to various common institutional priorities, including:
HIBAR projects enable university-based researchers and non-academic researchers and practitioners to work together on projects that strengthening commitment to research excellence and also greatly accelerate progress toward solving society’s critical problems, since co-produced research outcomes are more likely to be translated to benefit society in the long term.
Global Impact
The integrative cross-sectoral decision-making within a HIBAR project accelerates knowledge creation and generates better and faster solutions toward society’s critical problems. This strengthens a university’s relationships with non-academic organizations, and increases future opportunities to identify and contribute to solving societal challenges.
Talent Development
HIBAR projects offer experiential opportunities that lead to many different career paths. This creates a positive feedback loop: as more HIBAR-experienced researchers enter the workforce, they can help co-create and co-lead more university HIBAR collaborations that in turn create new HIBAR research opportunities for another generation of faculty and students.