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 they get along. How they actually function under the pressure of competing expertise, distributed decision-making, and funding timelines that do not forgive structural ambiguity.

    My research over the past decade focuses on what separates high-performing research collaborations from stalled ones. The answer is Integrative Capacity: the ability to align diverse expertise around a shared scientific mission and execute under real organizational pressure.

  • Team Science and Convergence Science are terms that matter significantly to NIH, NSF, and NCI. It is not a soft skills framework; it is a guarantee that scientific work that involves numerous stakeholders will be synchronous and successful.

    Most grant consultants review prose. What I do is different in scope and in sequence.

    Reviewers can tell the difference between a set of disciplines listed together and one linked by team science principles. The first looks like a collaboration. The second functions like one. That distinction shows up in the specific aims, the team management plan, and in how roles are defined and decisions are structured throughout the project period.

    I work across the full arc of a grant, not at the end of it. By the time a proposal reaches submission, the team science framing is woven through the document, not appended to it.

    That is not a common service. It requires someone who has both studied how research teams fail and sat on the grants that funded the work to understand why.

  • Research teams that benefit from this work include:

    - Principal investigators leading multi-site or multi-PI collaborations

    - Center directors and program leads managing across disciplines and institutions

    - Early- and mid-career researchers building their first independent labs

    - Clinician-scientists navigating translational team structures

    - Grant applicants who need reviewers to believe the team will actually function

  • I offer consultations, courses, and career conversations.

    If we have not worked together before, the first conversation is yours to direct. Some people bring a specific coordination problem. Others need a letter of support for a grant submission: a signal to reviewers that someone with team science expertise is attached to the project before a problem surfaces.

    Both are reasonable places to start.

  • 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

  • Courses -- $75 each

    Self-paced programs built on the Integrative Capacity framework. Designed for researchers who want to work through the material on their own timeline before engaging further.

    Consultations -- $250 per session

    One-on-one working sessions focused on a specific coordination problem, a grant-preparation challenge, or a career decision. The first conversation is free. It is yours to use however is most useful: walk me through where you are, what the project aims to accomplish, and where things are getting stuck.

    Grant Pre-Read -- $250

    A full review of a draft proposal prior to submission, with attention to how the team science narrative holds across the document. Includes written feedback. The letter of support, if needed, is scoped and billed separately.

    Letters of Support -- 3% to 10% effort, contingent on funding

    For researchers preparing NSF or NIH submissions who want a credible signal to reviewers that team science expertise is built into the project. If the grant is awarded, that effort is budgeted the way any collaborator's time would be. If it is not funded, there is no charge. The percentage reflects the level of involvement: a standard letter sits at the lower end; ongoing collaboration and co-investigator responsibility moves to a higher price point.

    [Book your free intro call](https://calendly.com/maritzasalazarcampo/30minmeeting)