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

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.