Background/objective

Growing recognition that collaboration among scientists from diverse disciplines fosters the emergence of solutions to complex scientific problems has spurred initiatives to train researchers to collaborate in interdisciplinary teams. Evaluations of collaboration patterns in these initiatives have tended to be cross-sectional, rather than clarifying temporal changes in collaborative dynamics. Mobile health (mHealth), the science of using mobile, wireless devices to improve health outcomes, is a field whose advancement needs interdisciplinary collaboration. The NIH-supported annual mHealth Training Institute (mHTI) was developed to meet that need and provides a unique testbed.

Methods

In this study, we applied a longitudinal social network analysis technique to evaluate how well the program fostered communication among the disciplinarily diverse scholars participating in the 2017-2019 mHTIs. By applying separable temporal exponential random graph models, we investigated the formation and persistence of project-based and fun conversations during the mHTIs.

Results

We found that conversations between scholars of different disciplines were just as likely as conversations within disciplines to form or persist in the 2018 and 2019 mHTI, suggesting that the mHTI achieved its goal of fostering interdisciplinary conversations and could be a model for other team science initiatives; this finding is also true for scholars from different career stages. The presence of team and gender homophily effects in certain years suggested that scholars tended to communicate within the same team or gender.

Conclusion

Our results demonstrate the usefulness of longitudinal network models in evaluating team science initiatives while clarifying the processes driving interdisciplinary communications during the mHTIs.

A growing evidence base suggests that complex healthcare problems are optimally tackled through cross-disciplinary collaboration that draws upon the expertise of diverse researchers. Yet, the influences and processes underlying effective teamwork among independent researchers are not well-understood, making it difficult to fully optimize the collaborative process. To address this gap in knowledge, we used the annual NIH mHealth Training Institutes as a testbed to develop stochastic actor-oriented models that explore the communicative interactions and psychological changes of its disciplinarily and geographically diverse participants. The models help investigate social influence and social selection effects to understand whether and how social network interactions influence perceptions of team psychological safety during the institute and how they may sway communications between participants. We found a degree of social selection effects: in particular years, scholars were likely to choose to communicate with those who had more dissimilar levels of psychological safety. We found evidence of social influence, in particular, from scholars with lower psychological safety levels and from scholars with reciprocated communications, although the sizes and directions of the social influences somewhat varied across years. The current study demonstrated the utility of stochastic actor-oriented models in understanding the team science process which can inform team science initiatives. The study results can contribute to theory-building about team science which acknowledges the importance of social influence and selection.

Synaptic vesicle transport by motor proteins along microtubules is a crucially active process underlying neuronal communication. It is known that microtubules are destabilized by tau-hyperphosphorylation, which causes tau proteins to detach from microtubules and form neurofibril tangles. However, how tau-phosphorylation affects the transport dynamics of motor proteins on the microtubule remains unknown. Here, we discover that the long-distance unidirectional motion of vesicle-motor protein multiplexes (VMPMs) in living cells is suppressed under tau-hyperphosphorylation, with the consequent loss of fast vesicle-transport along the microtubule. The VMPMs in hyperphosphorylated cells exhibit seemingly bidirectional random motion, with dynamic properties far different from those of VMPM motion in normal cells. We establish a parsimonious physicochemical model of VMPM’s active motion that provides a unified, quantitative explanation and predictions for our experimental results. Our analysis reveals that, under hyperphosphorylation conditions, motor protein multiplexes have both static and dynamic motility fluctuations. The loss of fast vesicle-transport along the microtubule can be a mechanism of neurodegenerative disorders associated with tau-hyperphosphorylation.