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A Project-Based Center

Our unique combination of goals is made possible through the project-based approach of the Center.  Rather than working through a traditional structure of members and fellows, in which those are requested to bring their grant funding to and through a center, in the project-based approach, each individual project stands autonomously.  The sole criteria for a project being part of the Center is whether the expertise and experience of the Center can help the members of the project, and in turn, whether the project and its funding can provide benefit to the Center.  In turn, this makes the Center an ideal setting for incubating and developing new projects and ideas, and for researchers to work together across disciplinary boundaries or levels of organization.

Our approach is particularly well suited to incubating and developing early-stage research projects and cross-disciplinary collaborations.

Our approach to projects is to engage academic researchers from various disciplines together in a project team that participates in formulating the project, developing research questions and approaches to them, conducting the research, and creating publications and products, where appropriate. 

Our approach to the work in these groups is not based on the pleasant assumption that collaborative work is more exciting and more productive.  Instead it is based on more than thirty years of experience that all work is hard, that collaborative work is likewise hard, if not harder, and that applying research-based practices about work (in the colloquial sense), performance of experts, and the biological foundations of complex cognitive work can yield a satisfactory approach—and one that participants can then take to future projects.

For more information on our approach, email cisw@colorado.edu.

Examples of current and past projects may be found on the Projects page.

Project Teams and Project Affiliates

Individual members of CISW project teams, from any unit of the University of Colorado, or any part of the broader CU research community, are designated as Project Affiliates of CISW during the duration of the project.  CISW project affiiation are welcome to maintain their connection with CISW after the project concludes. Or even better, continue the project!

Research and academic units of the University of Colorado that join with CISW in organizing or funding a specific project are designated as CISW Project Partners during the duration of the project.

CISW is formally governed by a group of Founding Fellows who maintain continuity and governance.  In practice, though, each project is governed by its Project Affiliates, in coopeation with its Project Partners and CISW.

Past and present Project Affiliates are in a wide range of disciplines at the University of Colorado, including molecular and cellular biology, mathematics, neuroscience, cognitive science, electrical and computer engineering, and operations research. 

International Members, Fellows, and Opportunities

The Center also maintains an active program of international collaboration.  In particular, the Work Meets Life project has been an ongoing cooperative project between researchers at the University of Colorado and the University of Cambridge since 2003, including the publication of a volume in 2011 by the MIT Press on understanding work processes in biological systems at different levels of organization and from the perspective of various disciplines.

From these projects, a system of International Fellows and Members, and seven current International Fellows and Members actively contribute to the Center’s activities: International Fellows and Members of CISW are currently at the University of Cambridge, University of St. Andrews, and universities in France, Finland, and Japan.