RAPID International Type I: Identifying Gaps, Interventions and Opportunities of International Collaboration During the Current COVID-19 Pandemic

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has not just caused catastrophic disruptions at the socio-economic levels but also adversely impacted international collaboration through a complete disruption in travel, face-to-face interactions, lab work, fieldwork, and hiring. Understanding how this pandemic impacted international collaboration is essential to inform program interventions and foster a more connected and resilient global research community. This study will collect time sensitive information from domestic and international researchers to understand major issues that may have disrupted their research activities, changes they explored to address these issues, and their perception on potential opportunities to facilitate international partnerships in such adverse conditions. This data is essential to inform current and future research programs to include international collaboration components that strengthen the resilience, robustness, and sustainability of international collaborations. By facilitating international research, this study will ensure continued access to expertise, research sites, facilities and equipment for researchers to maintain shared scientific progress to boost the U.S. national economy, prosperity, and human health and well-being. Due to facility shut-downs, safety issues and prescribed non-pharmaceutical interventions, hundreds of students, mostly from underrepresented minority groups are deprived of education and training opportunities embedded in international research. By enabling robust and resilient global partnerships, this study will benefit and influence a broader U.S. student population including underrepresented minority students. The collected data will also explain if existing technology infrastructure needs significant upgrades to strengthen international research collaborations.
This study will focus on three collaboration components: team dynamics, project logistics and research operations that govern the success of international research. In a one-year rapid response effort, we will conduct a series of virtual structured interviews and online surveys of at least 90 active projects involving global collaboration, identify and evaluate key issues and changes/interventions, and create a summary matrix of gaps mapped to opportunities. The main goal is to particularly explore the aspects of international collaboration that are integral to its robustness, resilience, and sustainability. We will target international collaboration projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as well as other federal agencies and multi-country annexes of global agencies such as the International Energy Agency (IEA). The results will offer critical data to explain how such conditions may have impacted these components, revealing key gaps and opportunities to provide directions for making current as well as future international research programs more robust, resilient and sustainable. It will also explain the changes made by the project teams and their effectiveness to address these issues created by the pandemic. The data analysis will further explain: (1) whether and to what extent the type of project, geographic location and demographic attributes of project teams moderated the impact on the robustness, resilience, and sustainability aspects of the project; (2) if certain mechanisms inherent in research programs or solicitations helped or worsened these aspects; and (3) whether certain project activities were more conflicting or challenging than the others. The first-hand data and answers to these questions will form a knowledge base for further research and help identify the areas of improvement in international research.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.