Research: EuResist

Recently I've become involved with an EU research project entitled EuResist, which is an international collaborative effort whose goal is to create a system to predict patient response to HIV -- a radical direction change from my usual meteorology/statistics research! As it happens, I joined a multidisciplinary team here at Kingston University (KU) where I'm the "technical" guy (general databases, statistics, software, maths) in a team containing a microbiologist, a social/sports scientist and a statistician plus a PhD student doing the work. The social scientist was responsible for getting KU involved in the project; we three joined at the last minute when the project started and she realised she couldn't do the work alone.

The project had a successful meeting in Stockholm last week (beautiful city) where the microbiologist and myself presented the preliminary work done by the student, but primarily we were asking for clarification as to what our role in the project is. Happily we now know and will be able to make progress...

So why mention this here? Because (a) it's an example of the pressure lecturers are under to do collaborative research in addition to a full teaching load and (b) it happens to provide a bad example of cooperation & leadership for me to moan about  :

Our coordinator, the social scientist, accepted the project in summer 2005. It was only in January 2006 that she realised she needed a team to provide the necessary skills, so at the last minute (literally, 3 days over a weekend before the initial "kickoff" meeting) she asked the microbiologist, who asked me and I asked the statistician to join in. We (3 newbies) refused to rush to the kickoff meeting unprepared, and she refused to go too, so the team at KU was pretty-much left to our own devices until last week.

Moreover, 3 weeks ago the social scientist mentioned in a meeting with the PhD student how she "had been trying to get rid of the project since August"! (a) How demotivating for the student and (b) how underhand -- she never mentioned this when she roped us in but wants to step back, keep the kudos of having brought in the project, presumably get her name on publications, but do no work plus leave the administration for the remaining 3 of us to do!

As I said, bad cooperation and leadership; we'll see what we can do to keep her involved...