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Collaboration Needs Nurturing and Commitment
Research Day symposium and poster session highlight interdisciplinary research
Working in a collaborative project is a whole lot like a marriage, says Eric Boerwinkle, Ph.D.
At the Research Day morning symposium, Peter Davies, M.D.,
Ph.D., left, executive vice president
for research at the UT Health
Science Center at Houston, visits with George Stancel, Ph.D.,
dean of the UT Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at
Houston. Pablo Okhuysen, M.D.,
began the afternoon session
with a presentation on conducting research through the General
Clinical Research Center, which he directs. Research Day was
organized by the health science
center Office of Research.
Photos by Ester Fant
It’s a long-term relationship that has to have an intellectual component and needs to grow over time. You have to nurture the collaboration just as you nurture your children or your students. You can’t take the collaboration for granted. You have to be committed and faithful to it.
Boerwinkle, holder of the Kozmetsky Family Chair in Human Genetics, was one of four senior faculty members who spoke at the morning symposium for Research Day at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. All four are principal investigators on large collaborative projects.
Setting the theme of “New Pathways to Discovery – Interdisciplinary Research Programs,” the speakers met the invitation of Peter J. A. Davies, M.D., Ph.D., executive vice president for research, “to talk about the benefits and challenges of engaging in this interdisciplinary research, working to bring together different academic disciplines, and to tell us from their experience the elements that are productive and the ones that are challenges.”
Interdisciplinary research, called the backbone of modern biomedical research, has been given added emphasis through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap initiatives, which provide funding for basic and clinical research and the training of future researchers.
A Learned Skill
Boerwinkle gave advice based on his experience in a 17-year project to develop a genetic risk score that predicts coronary heart disease above and beyond traditional risk factors. Collaborators include geneticists, epidemiologists, clinicians and pharmaceutical companies.
First place postdoctoral winner for her research poster,
Tasneem Bawa-Khalfe, Ph.D., from the Brown
Foundation Institute of Molecular
Medicine for the
Prevention of Human Diseases, accepts her award
from John Byrne, Ph.D., who chairs the UT Health
Science Center at
Houston Research Council.
Graduate students and postdocs presented
114
posters during the afternoon session.
“Interdisciplinary research, in my opinion, is a learned skill,” he said. “It’s important that we teach our students and our postdocs to participate in interdisciplinary research.”
Boerwinkle, who is professor and director of the Human Genetics Center and the Division of Epidemiology in the UT School of Public Health, a member of the Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine for the Prevention of Human Diseases, and a faculty member in the UT Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Houston (GSBS), shared a tip from his research advisor: “As you go through life, try to collaborate with people who are better than you are. You’ll rise to their level, and that will help build your research program.”
Talk to Each Other
A spina bifida project that has been funded for 18 years is the source of insight for Jack M. Fletcher, Ph.D., professor of pediatrics and associate director of the Center for Academic and Reading Skills at the UT Medical School at Houston. About 20 investigators include neuroscientists, electrophysiologists, psychologists, physicians, geneticists and statisticians.
The purpose of the project is to understand the causes of wide variations in physical and mental abilities of children with spina bifida – the interrelationships of genes, brain and behavior – over their life span.
“We started out small,” Fletcher said. “You can’t propose an interdisciplinary program project without a history of collaboration, a track record.”
Now the group has an “elaborate collaboration,” he said. “We’ve been able to get it to work because we talk to each other all the time – by telephone, not by e-mail.”
Fletcher is very familiar with the challenges of publication in a large collaborative project. “The key is to publish some things that are very much within a discipline. But we also publish in clinical journals that involve all of our different disciplines. I’ve had to write letters to the editors explaining why we need 15 authors on a publication.”
Project Dictates Disciplines
Scientists are collaborating across disciplines to study the much more basic collaboration of cells on the biochemical and molecular level. John H. Byrne, Ph.D., holder of the June and Virgil Waggoner Chair, leads a large multidisciplinary project to probe the underlying neural and molecular mechanisms of learning and memory. The demands of the project have dictated the disciplines involved.
“We’ve used a combination of behavioral techniques to identify a behavior that’s modified by a form of learning,” said Byrne, who is chairman of the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy in the Medical School and a GSBS faculty member. “We’ve used anatomical techniques and mathematical modeling to work out the neural circuitry, electrophysiological and neurophysiological techniques to identify neurophysiological correlates, and a combination of biochemical and molecular biological approaches to work out the mechanisms involved in memory.
“We’ve developed insights into a simple form of learning and the relationship between short-term memory and long-term memory,” he said. “We’ve identified some key signaling elements that can be targets for developing therapeutic interventions that could be used at some point to treat learning disabilities.”
Catalyst for the Future
A program to train future researchers in drug development is funded by an NIH Roadmap grant to the health science center as lead institution. Faculty members and trainees come from the six member institutions of the Keck Center of the Gulf Coast Consortia (see “Health Center Shares in Star Award” ).
“In some ways I see the training program more as a catalyst for the future than as an end in itself,” said George M. Stancel, Ph.D., GSBS dean and the John P. McGovern Professor of Biomedical Sciences. “Not only do you get the Ph.D. trained, but you also get new collaborations. You get all sorts of spin-offs.”
For example, each trainee has mentors from two different disciplines. Based on the work that one of the first trainees did, his two mentors started a new project that already has received an NIH grant.
Like several other speakers, Stancel praised the rich collaborative resources of the Texas Medical Center. “Without the TMC, you’re not going to be able to compete against the Harvards and Stanfords,” as this project did successfully, he said.
He also praised “all the people who helped put this grant proposal together. We couldn’t have done it without them.” Finishing the proposal, they arrived to meet the last FedEx truck of the day with seven minutes to spare.
By Ina Fried, Public Affairs