49: Collaborative Research – Managing Conflict: Howard Gadlin on what decades of mediating scientific disputes taught him about productive conflict

View the full show notes, including a summary of practical tips on the Amplifying Research website: https://www.amplifyingresearch.com/podcast/49-howard-gadlin

Every collaboration starts with excitement — shared interests, complementary expertise, a vision of what you could build together. But things rarely stay perfect forever. Personalities might clash. Contributions might not get recognised. Commitments might not be kept. Decisions on authorship might be delayed — or even reneged on. Howard Gadlin spent decades as an ombudsman at the NIH, UCLA, and Harvard, sitting across the table from research teams in exactly these moments — and what he learned is that the disputes we're most tempted to avoid are often the ones that matter most.

This is the second episode in our three-part miniseries based on the book How to Succeed at Collaborative Research, co-authored by Howard, Dr L. Michelle Bennett.

Howard started his career as a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts, where a two-year stint as the faculty ombudsman turned into a decade. He gave up tenure to take the role full-time at UCLA, where he specialised in identity-based disputes, before moving to the NIH — where he spent years mediating scientific conflicts and began to see the patterns that would shape his prevention-focused approach to collaboration. Along the way, he co-authored the NIH's Collaboration and Team Science Field Guide with Michelle.

"The only people more foolish than people falling in love are people starting a collaboration. They think just the passion of this shared interest is going to carry them through. It doesn't work that way." — Howard Gadlin

Whether you're a research leader trying to understand why the same interpersonal tensions keep surfacing in your teams, an operations lead looking for practical frameworks to bring to team facilitation, or a junior researcher wondering whether it's safe to speak up about a conflict — this episode offers both the reassurance that these disputes are normal and the tools to handle them well.

Our conversation covers:

Why the most common scientific disputes — authorship, mentor-mentee dynamics, team dysfunction — keep recurring across teams

Howard's journey from psychology professor to career ombudsman — and why he gave up tenure to do this work

A detailed case study: mediating between a junior scientist and three senior researchers at the NIH

Positions vs underlying interests — why "I want first authorship" is never the whole story

The five emotional dimensions of disputes: affiliation, appreciation, outcomes, role, and status