Proceedings of the 2015 Winter Simulation Conference L. Yilmaz, W. K. V. Chan, I. Moon, T. M. K. Roeder, C. Macal, and M. D. Rossetti, eds. A COMPUTATIONAL MODEL OF TEAM ASSEMBLY IN EMERGING SCIENTIFIC FIELDS Alina Lungeanu Sophia Sullivan Technology and Social Behavior Program Think Big Analytic Northwestern University 2240 Campus Drive 156 N. Jefferson St. Chicago, IL 60661, USA Evanston, IL 60208, USA Uri Wilensky Noshir S. Contractor Departments of Learning Sciences and Computer Science Departments of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences, Communication Studies, and Management and Organizations Northwestern University 2120 Campus Drive Northwestern University 2240 Campus Drive Evanston, IL 60208, USA Evanston, IL 60208, USA ABSTRACT This paper examines the assembly of interdisciplinary teams in emerging scientific fields. We develop and validate a hybrid systems dynamics and agent-based computational model using data over a 15 year period from the assembly of teams in the emerging scientific field of Oncofertility. We found that, when a new field emerges, team assembly is influenced by the reputation and seniority of the researchers, prior collaborators, prior collaborators’ collaborators, and the prior popularity of an individual as a collaborator by all others. We also found that individuals are more likely to assemble into an Oncofertility team when there is a modicum of overlap across its global ecosystem of teams; the ecosystem is defined as the collection of teams that share members with other teams that share members with the Oncofertility team. 1 INTRODUCTION Interdisciplinary scientific teams are frequently at the root of innovative breakthroughs (Uzzi and Spiro 2005). As a result, understanding the mechanisms behind the assembly of scientific teams has attracted scholarly interest. A first step has been to examine the compositional and relational mechanisms affecting the formation of scientific teams (Guimera et al. 2005; Lungeanu and Contractor 2015; Lungeanu, Huang, and Contractor 2014). Most prior research has treated teams as well-defined entities with a stable set of members who work interdependently toward a common goal (Cohen and Bailey 1997). However, the reality is that most knowledge workers hold membership in multiple teams simultaneously (O'Leary, Mortensen, and Woolley 2011), making membership in an ecosystem consisting of multiple teams with overlapping members the rule rather than the exception. Such ecosystems are dynamic and complex networks of prior collaborations (Poole and Contractor 2011) which enable and constrain the assembly of future scientific teams. Yet the effects of the ecosystem on team assembly have not been explored, perhaps because it entails complex statistical analyses across multiple levels. In response to this research gap we develop a multi-theoretical multilevel model that incorporates the impact of ecosystem factors on the assembly of interdisciplinary teams. Specifically, we draw upon 4057 978-1-4673-9743-8/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE