More than a decade of team science brings UNT Health and TCU students together
From left, Drs. Monica Jenschke, David Siderovski and Stephen Mathew helped lead this year’s Scientist-Clinician Team Science Workshop, part of a collaboration between UNT Health Fort Worth and TCU that has brought students and faculty together for more than a decade.
For more than a decade, students from UNT Health Fort Worth and Texas Christian University have stepped outside their disciplines to learn a fundamental lesson in science and healthcare: Complex problems are rarely solved from one perspective.
That lesson came to life again this fall at the Scientist-Clinician Team Science Workshop, where students from biomedical sciences, nurse anesthesia, nutritional sciences, kinesiology, physics and astronomy, and biology worked in interdisciplinary teams to develop a research approach around L-arginine and its potential role in appetite suppression or metabolic improvement.
The annual workshop is part of a collaboration between UNT Health and TCU that dates to 2015.
The idea originated with Dr. Monica Jenschke, professor in TCU's School of Nurse Anesthesia and an alumna of UNT Health's College of Biomedical and Translational Sciences. At the time, Jenschke was both a practicing certified registered nurse anesthetist and a doctoral student in pharmacology and neuroscience.
Her experience showed her the value of connecting two worlds. In the laboratory, she brought clinical questions into discussions of basic science. As a clinician and educator, she brought the science behind patient care into the anesthesia classroom.
Students from UNT Health Fort Worth and TCU exchange ideas and perspectives while working in interdisciplinary teams during the 2026 Scientist-Clinician Team Science Workshop.
Working with Dr. Michael Gatch, then the interprofessional education coordinator for CBTS, Jenschke developed a workshop that initially brought together biomedical science graduate students and resident registered nurse anesthetists to practice team science and learn to communicate across professional boundaries.
"The workshop grew out of the experience of a clinician immersed in the basic sciences," Jenschke said. "Bridging the gap between the two fields opens avenues for collaboration and ultimately, improving the quality of healthcare-related science."
Since then, the workshop has expanded to include students from TCU's kinesiology, nutritional sciences, physics and astronomy, and biology programs.
Dr. Stephen Mathew, associate professor of microbiology, immunology and genetics, director of Clinical Research Management and CBTS IPE coordinator at UNT Health, has been involved with the workshop since its beginning and has co-coordinated it with Jenschke since 2019.
Unlike a traditional lecture, students are intentionally placed in small groups with people from different fields and asked to work together on a research problem. Mathew said the goal is for basic scientists to better understand how discoveries translate to patient care while clinical students gain a greater appreciation for the research underlying diseases and biological processes.
This year's L-arginine exercise demonstrated how differently those disciplines can view the same evidence.
Dr. David Siderovski, professor of pharmacology and neuroscience at UNT Health, served as the workshop's discussion leader for the third consecutive year, guiding the live portion in which student groups defended their experimental designs and fielded questions and feedback from the audience.
Siderovski said a basic scientist might look at evidence that oral L-arginine raises the appetite-related hormones GLP-1 and PYY and see a biological mechanism worth investigating. A clinician may look at the same findings and ask a more immediate question: Did people actually eat less or lose weight?
"Neither perspective is more sophisticated than the other," Siderovski said. "They fail in different directions, which is exactly why you want both of them on the same team."
Other disciplines added their own questions. Pharmacology brought considerations of dose and exposure, nutritional sciences examined food intake and how it is measured, kinesiology brought in energy balance, and physics and astronomy contributed expertise in measurement. Nurse anesthesia students kept the discussion grounded in the patient and clinical relevance. Several faculty members from UNT Health and TCU served as facilitators, helping to keep discussions focused and aligned with the intended objectives.
For Siderovski, learning to communicate across those boundaries is an essential part of becoming a scientist.
"If you cannot explain what you found to someone who does not share your vocabulary, you have not finished the work," he said.
Deena Ibrahim, a PhD student in UNT Health’s College of Biomedical and Translational Sciences, experienced that firsthand.
"I had to explain scientific concepts in simpler terms, which was a good exercise in communicating research clearly," Ibrahim said.
She said hearing clinical and translational perspectives also made her think more about how laboratory findings can eventually be applied to patients.
Chase McMahon, a first-year PhD student in CBTS, saw the same connection while working alongside nurse anesthesia students.
"I felt that we were all moving towards the same goal of improving the life of patients, regardless of what profession we were a part of," McMahon said.
The nurse anesthesia students brought insight into clinical relevance and patient interactions, he said, while the scientists contributed their knowledge of biological mechanisms and research design. McMahon said defending the team's proposed study during a question-and-answer session also challenged his critical thinking and experimental design skills.
For Jenschke, those exchanges are what have made the collaboration valuable for more than a decade. TCU students gain access to biomedical researchers and perspectives they would not necessarily encounter within their own programs, while UNT Health students encounter clinicians and other scientists who approach research from different starting points.
"The value is the mismatch in that each group has to explain its assumptions to people who do not share them," Jenschke said.
Both Jenschke and Mathew credit the faculty, facilitators and students with sustaining the collaboration since 2015. While the number of disciplines involved has grown, its purpose remains much the same as when the first students gathered more than a decade ago.
Jenschke hopes students leave with a habit that extends beyond the workshop: identify what someone from another discipline knows that you do not, and start there.