CISW and its members and fellows have developed several cross-disciplinary scientific projects and project teams, including:
- Collaborating on making connections in basic research in mathematics and molecular biology
- Collaborating in neuroscience and evolutionary biology around trade-offs between energy and information in neural and organismal systems
- Developing empirical and theoretical approaches between molecular biology and neuroscience on system effects of aneuploidy on neural function
From collaborative work with research teams, and from research and practice on human work performance, CISW has developed practices with which investigators can enhance how their groups perform the Work of Research:
- Working groups across departmental boundaries for research grant development.
- Work process analysis for experiments, scaling, collaborative work, especially by identifying processes at risk for unanticipated changes.
- Selection of graduate students and team members into research teams, including teams involving multiple institutions.
- Changes in postdocs (and other lab personnel) often change experimental work processes and protocols in unanticipated and undocumented ways. Developing training for research team members in specific experimental work processes provides a method both for effective training and for ensuring continuity in the lab when postdocs change.
- Early research topic development frequently involves generating high rates of false negatives. Training graduate students (and mentors) in the risks of early-stage false negatives helps maintain productive idea generation, while also reducing later-stage dead-ends, frustration, and time without results.