Scialog®
The Initiative
Scialog® seeks to accelerate the work of 21st-century transformational science through funding research, intensive dialog and community building. Scialog has been conceived as a research grant program emphasizing annual meetings and the opportunity, encouragement and expectation to form cross-disciplinary teams. Each multi-year initiative will promote scientific innovation in the face of a complex research challenge that serves as a driver in contemporary science. Successful grantees will be asked to address a few narrowly focused issues on a particular research initiative and to communicate with one another in an annual closed conference environment for the purpose of sharing insights and building further collaborations.
These meetings are intended to advance human knowledge by building and strengthening a nationwide community of scientists, many of whom will have many promising years of research ahead of them. Through the give-and-take of community building, it is the foundation’s hope that Scialog participants will be better equipped to tackle even more challenging problems in the future. Success among initiative participants will be measured in terms of subsequent partnerships formed and how research clusters intersect with others in the academy, with the private industrial sector and with the federal sector to continue promising lines of research.
The new direction in which RCSA is going with Scialog is intended to : 1) support early career faculty to expand research in a specifically focused area determined to be urgently important for the nation's welfare; 2) to encourage scientists to form collaborative cross-boundary or interdisciplinary teams to tackle the critical areas identified by RCSA, and; help transition awardees to future funding.
The Scialog process will be guided by a panel of nationally recognized scientists chosen from the research, scholarly and science-policy communities.
With recent policy reports and our own 2005 annual report pointing to an evolution in modern research toward greater complexity, it is incumbent upon funders, both public and private, to seek bold and innovative ways to advance human knowledge toward these ends. As Brandeis University Professor Gregory A. Petsko noted in the 2005 RCSA annual report, interdisciplinary institutes are still considered experimental: "Anybody who tells you they know how to do it right is fooling themselves... We've got to do a lot more, because we don't know what models work..."
Thus, the Scialog initiative is a critically important experiment in collaboration and community-building as much as it is about promoting great science. And because we regard it as an experiment, RCSA scientists will be actively involved in all aspects of the initiative, as well as making site visits to successful grant recipients, in order to better understand both the research progress and "what works" in building collaborations and community.