The Wayne State University School of Medicine Office of Faculty Affairs & Professional Development welcomes all members of our community to join us for a special interactive presentation & discussion:

Team Science from the Inside Out: Mental Models, Shared Language, and High-Performing Teams

This session explores the science behind what makes collaborative research teams thrive, drawing on two frameworks — Burkus's model of high-performing teams and our visualized shared mental modeling framework for interdisciplinary teams solving complex problems in healthcare.  Participants will leave with practical tools for strengthening team communication, building psychological safety, and developing a shared conceptual language across disciplinary boundaries.

Learning Objectives:

• Describe the three core elements of high-performing teams — common understanding, psychological safety, and prosocial purpose — and identify strategies to cultivate each within their own collaborative research groups.
• Explain the concept of mental models and articulate how awareness of one's own mental model, and those of teammates, supports more effective interdisciplinary communication and decision-making.
• Recognize the role of a shared conceptual lexicon in preventing miscommunication and identify strategies to address construct excess, deficit, overload, and redundancy within interdisciplinary teams.

Guest Speaker:

Dr. Inas Khayal is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Oncology, Industrial and Systems Engineering, and Computer Science at Wayne State University, and an Adjunct Associate Professor at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice at Dartmouth College. Her career has been driven by one goal — improving outcomes for people living with chronic disease — a problem that required crossing multiple disciplinary boundaries. She began inside the clinic, using MRI to characterize brain tumors. When clinical efforts couldn't improve outcomes alone, she expanded outward — capturing biomedical, social, and environmental signals in real-world living environments through IoT-enabled living labs. When neither setting alone was sufficient, she integrated both — treating healthcare delivery itself as a complex, dynamic, socio-technical system to be understood, measured, and redesigned. She leads the Sustainable Health Lab, where engineers, clinicians, and data scientists collaborate across disciplinary boundaries, applying systems engineering and data science to health services research challenges, including quality measurement, health equity, and chronic care delivery. Her research on interdisciplinary team science, including her co-authored framework on Visualized Shared Mental Modeling, emerges directly from her own practice of building teams across medicine, engineering, and social science to solve problems no single discipline could solve alone.