Food security challenges require comprehensive solutions, and it makes sense to work in multidisciplinary collaborative teams. This is easier said than done. Bringing together engineers, biologists, and entrepreneurs to work efficiently on the same problem can be challenging due to different idiosyncrasies, communication styles, and disciplinary perspectives. In this paper, the coauthors share their road to collaboration. Dr. Rampersad, expert on food security, Dr. Robles, expert entrepreneurs, and Dr. Vargas, expert in product innovation now have an efficient collaboration system where students from different disciplines work seamlessly on the same challenges, in this case aquaculture, but the origins of this collaboration were trying.
At the beginning, 6 years ago, the faculty team decided to collaborate, soon they faced multiple challenges, ranging from differences in technical language, having unrealistic expectations, communication gaps, and lack of understanding other’s roles, among others. In this paper we recount these challenges, problems generated, and how these were addressed (and not necessarily solved!). This paper can serve as a practical guide for others to solve (or more accurately, improve) some of their multidisciplinary collaboration challenges. It can also serve as inspiration to readers feeling frustrated with their collaborations. The coauthors team has not solved all of their problems and issues; everyday they face new ones, but they have found principles by which to address any upcoming situation, and it all starts with respect and acknowledgement of the other.
As defined by Thomas Aquinas, nothing moves without motivation, and the coauthors motivation has been that the food security challenges (e.g. oyster farming, prawns farming among other projects), demand a sustainable and comprehensive solution with team of experts in different areas ideally working together. The coauthors realized that each challenge is one problem, and hence, required one team, hence, the mantra of their collaboration has been “we are one team”.