As research in the sciences and engineering becomes increasingly multidisciplinary, research managers and policy-makers are relying more on multi-institutional collaborations to develop strong, intellectually diverse teams that can answer complex research questions. Indeed, in the U.S. the past three decades could be credibly termed the “era of inter-institutional research collaboration”, as U.S. science and technology policy1 has moved from the decentralized support of small, investigator-initiated research projects to large scale and oftentimes centralized, block grant-based, multidiscipline research