Long before "team collaboration" became a standard phrase in the vocabulary of research institutions, Dr. Bennett recognized that the most consequential barriers to collaboration were not technical—they were human.

Michelle has been invited to work with teams and train researchers and institutional leaders at Emory, Stanford, Harvard, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, the American Association of Medical Colleges, Purdue, and dozens of other leading institutions. Her contribution is not simply scholarly—it is the work of someone who spent years inside complex scientific organizations understanding what collaboration actually looks like when it is working and when it is not, and then building tools that help other people replicate the conditions for success.

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Changing how science is done requires more than teaching new methods—it requires changing how researchers think about their work and their relationships with each other. In Ethiopia, Dr. Bennett has been doing exactly that. As the founder and lead of the Team Science Champions of Ethiopia program, a collaboration with Emory University, she is working with researchers at Addis Ababa University, the Armauer Hansen Research Institute, and the Ethiopian Public Health Institute to build a cadre of locally trained facilitators and coaches who can help research teams function more effectively across institutional and disciplinary boundaries. The program—designed around a "see one, do one, teach one" model that respects Ethiopian professional culture while introducing new practices around feedback, productive conflict, and psychological safety—completed a remarkably successful first year in 2025.