Scientific Collaboration – The Need of The Hour

What’s common between the Large Hadron Collider, the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, and the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center? It’s nothing but collaboration between research experts from across the globe.

 

The LHC was built in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries, as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories. Shire plc and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center recently announced a three-year, broad research collaboration to combat rare diseases. And AstraZeneca has signed a five-year collaboration deal with the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) to find new treatments for diabetes.

 

The world has never been so connected before and never before did we have the means to collaborate seamlessly like we do presently. The scientific world needs to collaborate more than ever before; however, in most cases, the means for finding the right collaborative partners are still largely rely on personal connections, networking at conferences, and serendipity.

 

In an era when postdoc jobs are becoming increasingly scarce, it’s almost surprising that many businesses are forced to slow down their innovation plans for the want of a research collaborator. Just a little bit of digging reveals that the lack of a proper platform to enable scientific collaboration is causing these problems.

 

The need of the hour is to build a platform that can enable both academia and businesses to find experts in every conceivable field without being weighed down by geographical limitations. Kolabtree endeavors to plug this gap and take global scientific collaboration to the next level.

 

We invite comments from Postdocs, PhDs, and research collaborators from across the industry to comment on specific sectors or areas of research that lack collaboration.