MSU One Health Research Sprint - Spring 2026

About

Between March and June 2026, the Office of Research and Innovation convened the One Health Research Sprint, a structured, time-limited process open to MSU faculty across every college and appointment type. More than 600 faculty took part. Over three months, an open call for input, a series of facilitated workshops, and faculty drafting teams turned what faculty submitted into a shared framework for One Health research at MSU and five major research themes that faculty continue to develop. This page records what the sprint set out to do, how it ran, and how faculty shaped the result. The 2026 sprint was co-led by Drs. Patricia Soranno and Kay Connelly in the Office of Research and Innovation.

What the Research Sprint Set Out to Do

The Research Sprint started from a single principle: no one college or discipline can define MSU’s One Health priorities on its own. It carried two kinds of goals at once. The research goal was to surface the full range of faculty work at the One Health intersection and name a focused set of research themes MSU could advance. The community goal mattered just as much: to connect faculty across colleges who had not worked together, build trust through an open and well-facilitated process, and leave faculty owning the priorities they helped write. We treated these as one job.

The Research Sprint built on the work of the President’s One Team, One Health Research Task Force, whose 2026 report recommended that MSU organize research around One Health and called for a faculty-driven process to identify the thematic areas. The sprint supplied that research content. It did not take up governance, leadership, or network structure, which the Task Force had taken up.

What Is One Health Research at MSU?

One Health at MSU is not everything that touches health or the environment. The sprint used a working definition built on two criteria. The first is that the research connects two or more health domains, human, animal, plant, or environment, in a way that changes the scientific question, the evidence required, or the solutions that become possible. The second is that the research traces a pathway from those cross-domain processes to human health as an outcome. Cross-domain research that meets the first criterion but not the second, for example work in animal, plant, or environmental health without a human endpoint, is valued in its own right and is part of the capacity the Network draws on.

This is a living definition that even evolved during the sprint. It should continue to be revised over time based on evidence and input from MSU scholars, partners, and communities. This working definition guided the sprint. It helped the sprint team and workshop participants assess whether proposed themes are sufficiently integrative, appropriately scoped, and strong candidates for further development.

How the Spring 2026 Research Sprint Was Conducted

The Research Sprint ran in six steps from March to June 2026.

• Request for Information (March 12 to April 7). An open call to all faculty. 309 submissions came in from more than 50 departments across 15 colleges. We clustered the submissions inductively into a first draft of themes.
• Theme-mapping workshops (April 14 and 16). About 180 faculty tested and revised the draft clusters across two large facilitated sessions in the MSU Union Ballroom. Their feedback produced the first revision of the framework, including the second definitional test.
• Vision-paper workshops (May 4 and 5). 64 faculty were selected (balanced across college, career stage, and expertise) to participate in the workshops; with 58 of them who developed the themes into vision papers.
• Vision-paper drafting and review (May to June). The vision-paper teams drafted the papers, which the synthesis team reviewed.
• Sprint Summit (June 15). The five teams presented their theme visions to research leadership and faculty. ~140 faculty and university leaders attended.
• Documentation and sharing (June 30). We returned the full record to everyone who took part and the rest of the MSU community: this framework, the five vision papers, and the supporting analyses and documentation.

Research Sprint Participants

The Research Sprint ran on faculty time that no one was required to give. More than 600 faculty took part across three months: reading submissions, writing, showing up to workshops, and working through hard questions about what counts as One Health at MSU and what does not. None of it was anyone’s assigned job. The framework exists because faculty chose to build it.

The Research Sprint was open to every appointment type, including tenure-system, fixed-term, research, extension, clinical, and emeritus faculty. Faculty did not need an existing One Health project, a finished team, or prior experience with large interdisciplinary efforts to take part. Many came away having met collaborators in other colleges they had not worked with before.

• Ten faculty members volunteered to co-lead the five vision-paper teams. They took on the hardest task in the sprint, pulling a dozen colleagues’ ideas into a single coherent paper and carrying it through to a finished draft on top of full workloads: Alex Burt, Amara Ezeamama, Samantha Gailey, Ramjee Ghimire, Maryam Goudarzi, Jennifer Lee Johnson, Rebecca Jordan, Carolyn Malmstrom, Laura Schmitt Olabisi, and Miriam Vos. In all, 58 faculty co-authored the five vision papers, and each paper lists its full author team.
• Expert facilitation made the conversations work. The Toolbox Dialogue Initiative Center and CIRCLE designed and ran the workshops, which enabled faculty to test ideas, surface missing perspectives, and shape the framework as it took shape. This is a skill most faculty and administrators lack, and the sprint depended on it.
• The Council of Research Deans guided and supported the sprint throughout, advising on scope and connecting the work to leadership across the colleges. University Advancement, including Stephanie Stotenbur, joined the planning conversations early and was invited into the work as it developed. 
• The One Health Research Sprint Synthesis Team provided insight and feedback and met regularly throughout the sprint: Susan Buchholz, Sri Kalyanaraman, Sheril Kirshenbaum, Jeffrey MacKeigan, Michelle Mazei-Robison, Miles McNall, Nara Parameswaran, Kari Sant, Terrie Taylor, and Kang Xia (co-chaired by Patricia Soranno and Kay Connelly).
• The sprint also depended on the people who made it run: Tanya Bakija and Erik Heckel led website, events, and communications support; Lauren Aerni-Flessner supported communications; Michelle David recorded the sessions; and Samantha Hawkins supported administration and the workshops.

The One Health Research Framework

The sprint produced a framework for One Health research at MSU, built entirely from faculty input, along with five major research themes that faculty teams continue to develop. Each theme is documented in a faculty-authored vision paper. The framework and the themes feed directly into the MSU One Health Research Network, which takes up the governance, infrastructure, and investment that One Health research at this scale needs. The Network is open to faculty across the university, including those who did not take part in the sprint. The sprint set the research direction. The faculty who shaped it carry it forward.

2026 Research Sprint Materials

The full sprint record is available to the MSU community: the framework, the five vision papers, and the supporting analyses are posted to the One Health Sprint Teams site and require an MSU login.

Join the One Health Sprint Teams site

Contact

Questions, accessibility needs, and materials access: Tanya Bakija, bakijata@msu.edu.

Questions about One Health research and getting involved: Kay Connelly, conne166@msu.edu.