At a recent All-to-All meeting on July 20, 2026, Jeroen van Tilborg, a senior scientist and deputy director at the BELLA Center in the Accelerator Technology & Applied Physics (ATAP) Division at Berkeley Lab, delivered a thought-provoking talk on the stewardship values of collaboration and team science in proposal writing.
One of the clearest illustrations of stewardship in collaboration is how teams engage across multiple divisions. The right approach, van Tilborg explains, is to “engage early, define roles and responsibilities, and make sure everyone has adequate time to review.” This, he adds, “builds trust, removes stress, and results in a stronger, more integrated proposal.” However, he warns against charging ahead prematurely—for instance, mounting a full-effort proposal push before receiving any encouragement. In such cases, the likelihood of success is quite low, he says, and “by taking away a lot of resources in this early work,” the team places “a strain on the projects that are funded.” The result is that team members are pulled away from funded commitments, which can create “stress and tension.” Good collaboration, van Tilborg says, “respects both the people involved and the ongoing work they are already responsible for.”
A recurring theme throughout his talk is that effective collaboration is captured in the guiding principle that “the best approach is a balance of pros, cons, risks, and rewards,” he says. To illustrate, van Tilborg points to a recent successful proposal submitted to the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) through the Reliable Ore Characterization with Keystone Sensing (ROCKS) initiative, which demonstrated the benefits of a disciplined, low-cost approach to early-stage collaboration.
“We started early, but only with a few very short brainstorming meetings,” he explains. “These were very high-level: what do we want to do, and which team members should be included?” The intent, he says, was to “quickly get these things sorted out and not to spend hundreds of hours on it before actual proposal encouragement.”
Collaboration also means resisting the temptation to “include everyone’s pet idea,” van Tilborg notes. Otherwise, the result is “a really scattered proposal that will just not get funded because it does not serve the funding agency’s interests.”
For the ARPA-E ROCKS proposal, the team closely aligned with both the sponsor’s and the institution’s goals. As van Tilborg put it, “We wanted to really lean on aligning the sponsor’s objectives and institutional missions.” Promising ancillary ideas—such as taking a laser system directly to a mine site for muon radiography—were respectfully set aside, he says. “We just have to put them off for later, for the future.” Saying no to good ideas, in service of a coherent whole, is “itself an act of team stewardship,” says van Tilborg.
The talk underscored that collaborative stewardship has real consequences for people. The risk of poor stewardship is stark. “The risk is that you come out of the experimental campaigns of a funded program essentially depleted, because to deliver over-ambitious goals, you run your facility into the ground,” he warns. The scale of this collaborative effort is considerable. As one participant noted, ATAP submitted 265 proposals last year. That volume of submissions, says van Tilborg, can “only be achieved through disciplined team science; it is stewardship in action.”
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