Funded by UCLA and UCI CTSI grants
ยท No cost to eligible participants
ยท Enrollment opens March 6 ยท Closes March 23, 2026
What this course equips you to do better:
- See how your lab actually operatesโso youโre no longer making leadership decisions in the dark or compensating for invisible system gaps.
- Build collaboration through structure, not personality by clarifying ownership, improving handoffs, surfacing and managing tension early, and designing workflows that hold up under pressure.
- Strengthen your contributionโwhether you lead the lab or work within it by understanding how structure, communication, and workload shape whatโs possible.
Rather than generic teamwork advice, this course helps you diagnose and adjust the systems that determine progress, so both people and science can move forward more predictably.
Your lab runs. But it runs on you.
You've built something real. The science is moving. People are producing. And yet โ you're the one absorbing every coordination failure. Every unclear handoff. Every meeting that ends without resolution. Every new member who takes six months to figure out how things work here because nothing is written down.
This isn't a failure of leadership. It's what happens when a lab is built around scientific expertise and never given the structural tools that high-performing teams actually use: shared decision frameworks, explicit role clarity, onboarding systems, accountability structures.
The Scientific Lab Accelerator was designed to fix that โ with evidence-based tools drawn from the science of how research teams coordinate, and a 10-week structure that builds your lab's operating infrastructure while the lab is still running.
WHAT YOU WALK AWAY WITH:
- A completed team charter โ your lab's shared operating document
- Defined decision rights and accountability structures
- A meeting design framework your team can run without you facilitating everything
- A member onboarding system that doesn't start from scratch every time
- 1:1 coaching with Dr. Salazar Campo tailored to your lab's specific coordination gaps
- A physical program kit โ workbook, tools, and branded items you'll work with, together.
- An ACTS-recognized digital credential, verifiable on LinkedIn and ORCiD (in process)
SLA is the right program if:
- You are a PI, lab director, or research team lead with direct responsibility for how your team operates
- Your lab is functional, but you're absorbing coordination load that should be shared
- You want to build systems that outlast any single team member โ including you
- You're at UCLA, UCI, or a UCLA CTSI partner institution (this cohort is grant-funded and free to eligible participants)
Not sure if SLA is the right fit? If you're an early- to mid-career researcher still building your independent program, the Research Career Accelerator may be a better match. If you're a PI actively working on a multi-site grant submission, look at the Proposal Prep Challenge. Reply to any Course Correction email and Dr. Salazar Campo will guide you to the program that best fits where you are right now.
Example Curriculum
Designed by a researcher who has studied scientific teams and team effectiveness for two decades.
Dr. Maritza Salazar Campo is an Associate Professor at UC Irvine and one of the leading researchers in the science of team science. She has spent her career studying how scientific teams coordinate, collaborate, and perform โ and publishing that research in peer-reviewed journals. She is a co-creator of TeamMAPPS, now used as a qualifying training for the ACTS Team Science Fundamentals Badge.
As an award-winning management professor at UCI's Paul Merage School of Business, she does not offer another "generic" management workshop. All of her offerings are structured training interventions grounded in published research on what makes scientific teams and leaders succeed or fail โ and what the ones that succeed actually do differently.
๏ปฟCheck out these options below:
