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Build up big-team science

Researchers are creating grass-roots collaborative networks to tackle difficult questions in primate studies and more, but they need funding and other support.
  1. Nicholas A. Coles

    1. Nicholas A. Coles is a research scientist at Stanford University, California, USA, and the director of the Psychological Science Accelerator.

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  2. J. Kiley Hamlin

    1. J. Kiley Hamlin is a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, and a member of the ManyBabies Consortium Steering Committee.

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  3. Lauren L. Sullivan

    1. Lauren L. Sullivan is an assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of Missouri, Columbia, USA, and the principal investigator of the Disturbance and Resources Across Global Grasslands (DRAGNet) project.

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  4. Timothy H. Parker

    1. Timothy H. Parker is a professor at Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington, USA, and a member of the Disturbance and Resources Across Global Grasslands (DRAGNet) project, among others.

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  5. Drew Altschul

    1. Drew Altschul is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and a member of the ManyPrimates project.

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Are some of science’s biggest questions simply unanswerable without redefining how research is done? This is the question that motivated the researchers who would later establish the ManyBabies Consortium: a grass-roots network of some 450 collaborators from more than 200 institutions who pool resources to complete massive studies on infant development (see, for example, ref. 1). Human infants are perhaps the most powerful learning machines on the planet — and understanding how that learning occurs could inform artificial intelligence, public policy, education and more. Yet a full understanding of infant learning seemed difficult (if not impossible) under the current research model.

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Nature 601, 505-507 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-00150-2

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Competing Interests

All of the authors are members of research consortia that specialize in big-team science.

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