Eunjung Sally Lee

The modern biomedical research community is facing ever more challenging research questions. Out of necessity, biomedical research has become increasingly interdisciplinary and large-scale in nature. Yet large-scale interdisciplinary biomedical collaborations are not easily established or maintained. Many funding agencies identify biomedical informatics as an important foundation to support biomedical collaboration to alleviate some of the challenges large-scale interdisciplinary collaborations face. However, biomedical informatics has yet to understand in detail how large-scale interdisciplinary biomedical collaborations operate and deal with day-to-day challenges associated with collaboration.
This research used contextual field study to describe the characteristics of large-scale interdisciplinary biomedical collaboration in-depth and to identify barriers, existing facilitators, and needs associated with various collaborative processes. The study result was synthesized to develop a context-specific informatics framework to support large-scale interdisciplinary biomedical collaboration that extends prior research of collaboration in other fields. In the future, the framework can be used as a guide for design and evaluation of collaborative infrastructure.