Nick Berente, assistant professor of MIS, received a $205,000 award from the National Science Foundation to develop a prototype for an online environment to help science leaders run their large-scale enterprises more effectively. The online environment, known as the Virtual Organizations Resources and Toolkits Exchange (VORTEX), will be developed to help scientists manage and navigate the incredibly complex enterprises of contemporary “big science.”
Science enterprises (such as the Large Hadron Collider) involve multiple disciplines, globally distributed teams, supercomputers, extremely big datasets and other issues that can often benefit from the lessons of organizational research.
Berente is collaborating with researchers at the University of Texas at Austin on this project. The online environment will be integrated with a similar environment from the National Institutes of Health, intended to translate organizational research for scientists.