Dr. Maritza Salazar Campo

Team Science Program Director, UC Irvine & UCLA Clinical and Translational Science Award,

Over two decades of helping investigators get federal funding. Funded projects include three National Research Traineeship awards, eight NIH grants, three individual NSF project awards, and multiple years of CTSA funding through UCI and UCLA.

On some projects, I served as PI or co-PI; on others, I was brought in as a team science consultant to strengthen the collaborative structure prior to submission. Both roles inform what I offer here.

Frequently Asked Questions

The science that researchers and clinicians do matters. Illness does not wait for teams to get organized. Don’t let your team's social dynamics hinder scientific progress.

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  • Team science is the study of how interdisciplinary and multi-site research teams coordinate complex work, not how well they get along, but how they actually function under pressure. It looks at the structures, routines, and leadership practices that determine whether a group of experts produces breakthrough work or slowly grinds to a halt. As research funding increasingly flows to large, cross-disciplinary, multi-institution efforts, the ability to lead a team well has become inseparable from the ability to do the science.

  • The hardest problems in science — cancer, climate, neurodegeneration, pandemics — don't respect disciplinary boundaries. Solving them requires molecular biologists, clinicians, engineers, statisticians, and social scientists working on the same question at once. Funders know this: NIH, NSF, and CTSA programs now weigh the quality of a team's collaborative structure alongside the quality of its science. A strong idea attached to a weak team plan is increasingly a losing proposal. And the cost of getting it wrong isn't just an unfunded grant — it's stalled discovery. Illness doesn't wait for teams to get organized.

  • Most research teams don't fail for lack of talent. They fail because there's no system linking one expert's insight to another's question to a third's method. The expertise is all in the room; it just never connects. I call the missing ingredient Integrative Capacity — a team's ability to link its existing expertise through deliberate structures, routines, and leadership practices. It's what turns a collection of specialists into a team that actually thinks together. Read more about Integrative Capacity →

  • Certain patterns show up again and again in teams that stall:

    Parallel play. Experts work side by side on their own pieces and assume integration will happen on its own. It never does.

    Decision drift. No one is clear on who decides what, so choices get relitigated, deferred, or quietly made by whoever is loudest. More on this in Five Strategies for Leading Interdisciplinary Research Teams →

    Blaming the "difficult person." Teams pin their dysfunction on one hard-to-work-with individual when the real problem is structural. Why your difficult person probably isn't the problem →

    Rewarding the wrong work. Incentives celebrate individual output while the collaborative, integrative work that makes teams succeed goes unrecognized. Why team science still rewards the wrong work →

    Leaders promoted without preparation. Brilliant scientists become PIs and center directors with no training in how to lead a team, and are left to figure it out mid-flight. Leadership development for mid-career scientists →

  • My work on team science has been published in the Oxford Handbook, Small Group Research, the Journal of Clinical and Translational Science, and the American Psychologist, among others.

    Current NSF and NIH-funded projects focus on scaffolding interventions in scientific collaborations, team recovery and performance, and leadership development for diverse early-stage investigators.

    As a business professor and trained executive coach, I translate team science expertise in a way that's personal, insightful, and constructive

  • Good team science replaces hope with design. A few of the building blocks:

    Integrative Capacity is the overarching frame: build the specific structures and leadership routines that connect expertise, rather than assuming smart people will integrate on their own.

    Clear decision architecture — defining who decides, who advises, and who is informed — so decisions move forward once instead of endlessly resurfacing.

    Intentional coordination routines — the meetings, handoffs, and shared artifacts that keep distributed expertise in sync, especially across sites and time zones.

    Trust built through structure, not personality — psychological safety and reliable follow-through engineered into how the team operates, not left to chance. How hidden networks shape scientific careers →

  • I'm Dr. Maritza Salazar Campo, Team Science Program Director for the UC Irvine & UCLA Clinical and Translational Science Award and a tenured professor of organization and management at UC Irvine. Over two decades I've helped investigators win and deliver federal funding — including three National Research Traineeship awards, eight NIH grants, three individual NSF project awards, and multiple years of CTSA funding through UCI and UCLA. On some projects I served as PI or co-PI; on others I was brought in as a team science consultant to strengthen the collaborative structure before submission. Both roles inform everything here. description

  • If you lead a research team and any of the failure modes above sound familiar, the good news is that they're fixable — and fixable by design, not by hoping people change. The science that researchers and clinicians do matters, and your team's social dynamics shouldn't be what holds it back.

    Explore ways to work together → · Book a call →