Getting Smart and Connected to Advance Social Work Science: Funding Opportunities through the National Science Foundation

Over the past several decades multidisciplinary collaborations have become necessary for advancing social and health sciences. As a result, the social work discipline has developed a strong understanding of the culture, norms, and languages of other disciplines, mainly other helping professions such as psychology, nursing, and medicine. However, there hasn't been the same level of effort to socialize social work researchers with the STEM disciplines. With the rapid speed in technology advancements, collaborations with disciplines such as computer science, robotics, and engineering will be paramount to maintain innovation in social and health science.

While partnerships with STEM researchers offer opportunities for advancing social work science, such collaborations are mutually beneficial. STEM researchers typically do not receive the level of training that social workers have in community-based research methodologies or diversity. This has contributed to the digital divide that social workers often observe in their research and practice, where certain populations - often older adults, rural residents, and racial/ethnic underrepresented groups - have been underserved by technologies that may be beneficial to them. Similarly, recent literature has documented the lack of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the design and functioning of many technologies. Hence, social work perspectives in STEM could help advance technologies to be more usable and helpful for a diverse population.

That National Science Foundation's (NSF) Smart and Connected Communities (SCC) and Smart and Connected Health (SCH) funding programs offer unique opportunities for social work to collaborate with STEM disciplines to address challenges experienced by communities and health care systems. The aim of these programs is to solve problems identified by communities and organizations with scientific innovations. Successful research proposals are those that are innovative, recenter research questions and methodological design to be community-driven, and integrate plans to democratizing knowledge to maximize the impact of research findings. Social work's long history of community based (especially community-based participatory) research aligns well with the mission of these funding programs. However, collaborations with STEM colleagues are imperative, since social work researchers may have limited understandings of the capabilities of innovative technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robotics, computer science, and geospatial tools. Despite the relevance of the Smart and Connected funding programs to social work science, few social workers apply for these grants.

In this workshop, participants will learn more about NSF funding, including the review criteria and grant review process, from a Smart and Connected grant principal investigator who has also served as a grant reviewer for both the SCC and SCH grant programs. It will also review the fundamentals of team science and its role in developing successful research teams that involve collaborations between social work and STEM researchers. Participants will be encouraged to share their own research aims and grant project ideas to discuss and identify how their work may be relevant to the SCC and SCH funding programs.