Building capacity in science

 Here's a post from Nature about some of the projects highlighted by the recent Einstein Foundation awards for promoting quality in research

Science Should Value Building Research Capacity

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The Source

Written by Patrick S. Forscher and Moreen Terer

Science values outstanding, already-completed scientific achievements and the people who make them. This priority is illustrated in the profusion of scientific awards, such the Nobel Prize, Fields Medal, and Breakthrough Prize, that reward these accomplishments. However, science places less emphasis on efforts to promote quality within the research ecosystem itself. Nor does science typically recognize the critical capacity-building activities that are necessary to create the robust scientific ecosystems necessary to produce high quality research in the first place.

On November 21, 2021, the Einstein Foundation broke with this trend by issuing a series of awards for efforts to promote quality within the research ecosystem itself. Even more unusually, one of its award categories, the Early Career category, recognized not past achievements but rather outstanding proposed projects that showed special promise in promoting future quality. Four projects were shortlisted for this €100,000 award.

The projects that were shortlisted for the Early Career award shared something in common that may be unexpected: they are unusually focused on building a strong scientific community, especially in groups and settings that science has neglected. Take the first author’s (Patrick Forscher’s) project, for example. This project aimed to grow behavioral science in Africa by building a website, called “Lab in a Box”, to make it easy to set up a new behavioral lab in Africa, enhancing an existing database of measures with existing measures that are adapted to African languages and contexts, and stocking that database with newly translated and adapted measures. These activities are feasible due to Patrick’s position at a research center, the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics, that is both headquartered in Africa and dedicated to advancing behavioral science in the Global South. As Africa currently produces 2% of all research output (Kasprowicz et al., 2020), capacity-building activities such as the ones proposed are critical if behavioral science is to establish a robust presence in Africa.

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Capacity building is important in medicine as well as in science.  Here's a paper on global chains of kidney exchange, that would contribute to building surgical capacity around the world.

Global kidney chains, by Afshin Nikzad, Mohammad Akbarpour, Michael A. Rees, Alvin E. Roth, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Sep 2021, 118 (36) e2106652118; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2106652118