The factors driving pressing public health problems rarely lie purely within one scientific discipline, and effectively addressing them inevitably involves drawing on the expertise, skill sets, experience, analysis and resources of those across multiple organisations and fields of study. The benefits of diversity in viewpoints and the importance of mitigating inequities and inclusion of underserved voices further stress the imperative of working effectively with teams including diverse life experiences, backgrounds and ways of thinking. This module covers the basic principles, processes and practices of teamwork across disciplinary and sectoral lines in the sciences and health partnerships. The target audience is graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and early career researchers, particularly those planning or considering careers in interdisciplinary team contexts. Reflective of the MIPPH context, this module places particular emphasis on facilitating teamwork around interdisciplinary projects involving dynamic modelling and artificial intelligence applied to health issues. Benefits to students include an improved capacity to form and support interdisciplinary teams and greater effectiveness in communicating across the diverse backgrounds represented within a team, helping to prevent misunderstandings and reduce the likelihood of waning engagement or trust among team members from different backgrounds.

Learning Objectives

This module will provide the ability to:

• Distinguish between unidisciplinary, multi/crossdisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary team characteristics and environments
• Identify successive benefits secured by proceeding between such successive levels
• List at least 5 common barriers to communication, coordination and joint work between team members in multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary environments
• Characterise the value of a positionality statement within a diverse team
• Describe the need for and role of team science is affected by the need to address complex systems and wicked problems
• Characterise 6 ways in which team trust can be built, and its role in team functioning
• List 3 supports that can facilitate a team's movement in transitioning from an interdisciplinary to a transdisciplinary environment
• Describe at least 4 of 6 types of contextual factors can that can affect a team's ability to realise such a transition

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Bio: Dr. Nathaniel Osgood is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Director of the Computational Epidemiology and Public Health Informatics Laboratory, and Associate Faculty in the Department of Community Health & Epidemiology at the University of Saskatchewan. His research is focused on providing cross-linked simulation, data science, categorical computing, topology data analysis, and machine learning tools to inform understanding of population health trends and health policy trade-offs. Dr. Osgood served for 8 years as Chief Research Advisor and Lead Methodologist for the Saskatchewan Centre for Patient-Oriented Research and has contributed to over a dozen initiatives involving people with lived experience and the health system with dynamic modeling, machine learning and big data collection efforts, and contributes category-theory based innovation to support such efforts. Among his many data science contributions, Dr. Osgood is the co-creator of two novel mobile sensor-based epidemiological monitoring systems, most recently the Google Android- and iPhone-based Ethica Health (now Avicenna) platform applied in hundreds of health studies around the world, and has overseen extensive analysis work in studies conducted with these platforms using broad combinations of statistical, machine learning, topological data analysis and visualization methods. Prior to joining the University of Saskatchewan, he graduated from MIT with a PhD in Computer Science, served as a Senior Lecturer and Research Associate at MIT and served in a variety of academic, consulting and industry positions.