Building brain capital.

Brains are indispensable drivers of human progress. Why not invest more heavily in them? We seek to place Brain Capital at the center of a new narrative to fuel economic and societal recovery and resilience.

Trends in Multidisciplinary Hazard and Disaster Research: A 1982-2017 Case Study.

From 1982 to 2017, 539 unique awards studying extreme events and natural disasters have been funded by the Infrastructure Management and Extreme Events (IMEE), Decision, Risk and Management Science (DRMS), Humans, Disasters, and the Built Environment (HDBE), and Hazard Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (Hazard SEES) programs under the National Science Foundation, totaling approximately $450 million. The relationships between discipline, topic, and funding are explored through review of the data on each award's active dates, amount of funding received, specific hazards and disasters studied, and principal investigator (PI) and co-PI affiliations. A positive correlation between award funding and increasingly larger multidisciplinary teams of PIs on projects is observed. However, these teams of four or more PIs only account for about 18% of the total number of awards. In terms of topic, projects applicable to general hazard/disaster research encompass the largest portion of awards, but not the greatest funding per award on average. Additionally, both the number of awards per year and the total funds allotted per year show an increasing trend. Finally, some of the trends in project team discipline with relation to hazards show a shift to equal numbers of engineers and social scientists on multidisciplinary teams while others remain fairly homogeneous in their team dynamics. This article provides unique perspectives on how to better allocate funds through extensive topic and funding analysis. This work is a brief analysis of trends in the hazard and disaster research community, focusing on multidisciplinary project teams and their correlation to funding amounts and research areas.

Organizing a Multidisciplinary Research Team: Strategies, Execution, and Outcomes.

Maintaining a competitive edge is increasingly imperative for surgical research teams. To publish as efficiently and effectively as possible, research teams should apply business strategies and theories in everyday practice. Drawing from concrete examples in both the corporate and nonprofit worlds, and by reflecting on the practices of the Michigan Comprehensive Hand Center for Innovation Research, this article identifies important business theories that can be applied to plastic surgery research. These theories can potentially be applied in practice and include (1) development of a realistic vision and strategies, (2) effective execution of these strategies, and (3) reflective evaluation for continual improvement.

Interdisciplinarity research based on NSFC-sponsored projects: A case study of mathematics in Chinese universities.

We investigate the interdisciplinarity of mathematics based on an analysis of projects sponsored by the NSFC (National Natural Science Foundation of China). The motivation of this study lies in obtaining an efficient method to quantify the research interdisciplinarities, revealing the research interdisciplinarity patterns of mathematics discipline, giving insights for mathematics scholars to improve their research, and providing empirical supports for policy making. Our data set includes 6147 NSFC-sponsored projects implemented by 3225 mathematics professors in 177 Chinese universities with established mathematics departments. We propose the weighted-mean DIRD (diversity of individual research disciplines) to quantify interdisciplinarity. In addition, we introduce the matrix computation method, discover several properties of such a matrix, and make the computation cost significantly lower than the bitwise computation method. Finally, we develop an automatic DIRD computing system. The results indicate that mathematics professors at top normal universities in China exhibit strong interdisciplinarity; mathematics professors are most likely to conduct interdisciplinary research involving information science (research department), computer science (research area), computer application technology (research field), and power system bifurcation and chaos (research direction).

White paper on the study of birth defects.

Birth defects are the leading cause of infant death in the United States and among the top causes of pediatric death and hospitalization. Despite the devastating impact of birth defects, we understand little of their etiology impeding progress towards treatment and prevention. Moreover, while surgical interventions have improved survival for many children to beyond their first year, our inability to accurately predict, diagnose and treat the common sequelae of birth defects leaves the economic, social and public health burden of birth defects unacceptably high. An estimated one-third of all pediatric hospital beds are occupied by a child with a genetic diagnosis, and emerging genomic sequencing technologies provide an unprecedented opportunity to identify the genetic variants, including those that cause birth defects. It is essential that we leverage these advances to enhance our understanding of birth defects. Such an effort will lead to new avenues for treatment and provide benefits to families, including improved understanding of the cause of a child's condition and the risks to any future children. Understanding the genetics of human birth defects presents many challenges, some shared with other pathologies and some unique. This White Paper outlines the need for a birth defect genomics initiative, the challenges to overcome, and suggested solutions. Ultimately, we conclude that understanding birth defects must be a trans-NIH effort and involve the development of a new type of interdisciplinary team comprised of clinicians, geneticists, genomicists, epidemiologists, biostatisticians and basic cellular and developmental biologists working together in all aspects of the enterprise. Birth Defects Research 109:180-185, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.