Inaugural Team Science Research Grant Awarded

Explores the Voynich Manuscript and examines interdisciplinary team dynamics on a challenging project

During the 2023-24 academic year, the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Education, and Herff College of Engineering collaborated to offer the inaugural Team Research Grant Program to support interdisciplinary research and enhance competitiveness for external funding. Research teams for this program needed at least one faculty member per college and grant proposals were required to include a description of the nature of the interdisciplinary collaboration and the value of team science to the proposed project. The inaugural award went to a team led by PIs Dr. Leah Windsor (English/Institute of Intelligent Systems), Dr. Jenn Pickering (Center for Applied Earth Science and Engineering Research), and Dr. Sara Bridges (Counseling, Educational Psychology and Research). 

This project represents research across two levels: first, the scientific exploration of the Voynich Manuscript, a document written in an as-yet undeciphered language carbon dated to the early 1400s; and second, a scientific examination of the dynamics of team interaction when members from diverse disciplines collaborate on a fundamentally difficult project. The Voynich Manuscript contains hundreds of pages of drawings of plants, of concentric circles seemingly representing signs of the Zodiac, and women in mineral baths. The team is studying this manuscript from the disciplinary perspectives of linguistics, archaeo-astronomy, chemistry, computer science, statistics, art history and Medieval history, anthropology, and earth systems science – and most importantly, they are interrogating the manuscript from all these perspectives simultaneously in a unified approach.

There are a variety of possible outcomes for studying the Voynich Manuscript: incremental progress short of a full solution; solving the mystery of its origin and language - whether as a hoax or real historical document; or failing to make any “progress” at all toward a tangible solution. It’s possible they could exclude some of the existing hypotheses about the origin and meaning of the Voynich Manuscript, thus narrowing the field of possibilities for what it could be and mean. 

At the center of this research is the process of self-discovery that will yield valuable contributions to the study of the Science of Teams, including how groups are formed and sustained, how they overcome conceptual and theoretical gaps across disciplines and fields, and how they handle uncertainty. The group aims to develop a transdisciplinary model for studying, assembling, and coordinating diverse teams that addresses current gaps in Team Science by specifying the mechanics and dynamics of interdisciplinary collaboration.

They are not only leveraging each other’s expertise and methodological frameworks and perspectives to think outside our disciplines, the team is trying to see the project through the experiences of other research paradigms. In other words, can a Computer Scientist think like an Art Historian (and vice versa)? Can an Anthropologist think like an Astronomer (and vice versa)? They want to not only see things from another perspective, but through another perspective.

The benefits of this research include a new generalized understanding of how transdisciplinary groups coordinate their research. This model could be applied to other teams working on cutting-edge research from many domains - including the ethics of AI, the dark genome and genomic research, and exploration/colonization of Mars and beyond.

For more information on the project, contact Windsor at lcwells@memphis.edu, Pickering at jlpckrng@memphis.edu or Bridges at sbridges@memphis.edu.