Smeal Professors Awarded $385,000 National Science Foundation Grant

UNIVERSITY PARK, PA (February 21, 2008) – The National Science Foundation has awarded a $385,000 research grant to two professors at Penn State's Smeal College of Business to study the architecture of transdisciplinary scientific collaboration.

Raghu Garud, professor of management and organization, and Barbara Gray, professor of organizational behavior, will study the elements that enable researchers from different disciplines to develop innovative research by working across disciplinary boundaries. Garud and Gray, along with three doctoral students, will study research collaboration in two settings that have the potential to yield valuable new research insights.

One setting involves a National Institutes of Health-supported transdisciplinary initiative among researchers from seven universities who are studying tobacco cessation science and policy. The second setting is the ATLAS Experiment at CERN Laboratories in Switzerland. ATLAS involves 2,000 scientists and engineers at 151 institutions in 34 countries who are collaborating to build a detector for testing the properties of high energy particles.

In each setting, researchers strive to integrate diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives to achieve new scientific breakthroughs. Garud and Gray are studying the dynamic interplay between structural factors and emergent processual issues that occur as scientists traverse disciplinary boundaries.

For instance, recent literature identifies an important role for certain individuals, called brokers, who bridge epistemic communities and facilitate required translation processes. Garud and Gray will examine the roles and characteristics of brokers in fostering these scientific networks and how the locus of brokerage evolves over time. 

They will also investigate the material artifacts and boundary objects that facilitate collaboration across scientific boundaries and within virtual scientific communities. Drawing on social network analyses and narrative approaches, they will interview researchers in both projects, observe working group meetings and utilize surveys, archival reports, and publication data to develop a new explanatory model of the processes by which complex, transdisciplinary science unfolds over time.

The grant was awarded under the National Science Foundation's Science of Science Policy Program, which seeks "to develop usable knowledge and theories of creative processes and their transformation into social and economic outcomes."

Garud is Alvin H. Clemens Professor of Entrepreneurship and research director of Smeal's Farrell Center for Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Prior to joining Smeal, Garud was on the faculty of the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University, where he studied how innovation unfolds within and across firms. His research interests include modularity, industry emergence, intellectual capital, and path creation.

He holds a Ph.D. in strategic management and organization from the University of Minnesota and an M.B.A. from Xavier Labor Relations Institute in India.

Gray is director of Smeal's Center for Research in Conflict and Negotiation and has been on the Smeal faculty since 1979. Her research interests include inter-organizational relations, multiparty collaborative alliances, organizational and environmental conflict, team dynamics, and sense making.

She holds a bachelor's degree in chemistry from the University of Dayton and a Ph.D. in organizational behavior from Case Western Reserve University, and has been a visiting professor at several European universities.