Podcast with Theo Mulder on scientific collaboration and research consortium

What happens when you publicly criticize five major research institutions for not collaborating , and they call you back to fix it? Neuroscientist Theo Mulder shares the inside story of building a 200-person scientific consortium from scratch, and why trust and the willingness to share are the only things that make large-scale research collaboration work. Subscribe for more episodes on the science of collaboration. Theo Mulder's career arc reads like a case study in escalating collaborative complexity: from experimental neuropsychologist to professor of movement disorders, then director of 17 institutes at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, and finally architect of a major interdisciplinary consortium linking five research partners. Each transition taught him something different about what makes collaboration succeed or fail at scale. The conversation opens with a candid origin story. In 2017, Mulder gave a public lecture criticizing five Dutch institutions , Radboud University, the University Hospital, Sint Maartenskliniek, and the Technical University in Twente , for failing to cooperate on human movement disorders despite all being specialized in the field. He expected nothing to come of it. Instead, the boards called him and said "you have a point," launching a consortium of 200 researchers that he chaired for four years. On the defining features of collaboration, Mulder is direct: trust and the willingness to share. He cites a sign in Groningen University Hospital: "If you cannot share, you cannot multiply." Political pressure to form large consortia is real, European science policy increasingly demands it, but without genuine trust between participants, no amount of structural incentive produces real collaboration. His experience directing the Royal Academy institutes reveals the limits of top-down collaboration. Within individual domains, humanities, biology, neuroscience, cooperation existed naturally. Between domains, it did not. Mulder learned that interdisciplinary collaboration cannot be mandated; it must be cultivated through shared problems that genuinely require multiple perspectives. The discussion addresses a practical insight often overlooked: the importance of engaging junior researchers, not just principal investigators. Mulder argues that PhD students and early-career scientists carry the collaborative flame forward as multi-year projects evolve. When COVID prevented in-person symposia, this pipeline broke , you cannot build a scientific community through boxes on a screen. On COVID's broader lessons, Mulder notes that the pandemic proved collaboration works under pressure: vaccine development that normally takes years was accomplished in eighteen months through unprecedented scientific cooperation, driven by trust, willingness to share, and societal urgency. The lesson is that humans can collaborate at extraordinary speed when the stakes are clear. His view of human nature is balanced: Homo sapiens is a group animal with both angel and devil inside. Cooperation is one of our core social needs, alongside physical contact and the sharing of thoughts through gathering. If he could change one thing, it would be to lower the level of jealousy , the quiet saboteur of every collaborative enterprise. Part of the Ernst Strüngmann Forum series on Collaboration, produced with the Convergent Science Network.