I have become deeply interested in these areas after being nudged in this direction by several visionary senior administrators at my university, and through (quite literally) hundreds of subsequent conversations and interactions that I have had with both expected and unexpected partners from across my university and the surrounding community. These collaborations have grown out of a project called Spit for Science, which is a university-wide research project focused on alcohol and other drug use, and related mental health outcomes (Dick et al., 2014). Spit for Science started as a research project with scientific aims very similar to many of my other on-going studies: to characterize genetic and environmental influences across development, in this case, across the transition through college. But there was one key difference: unlike all of my other projects, where data collection happened at different sites around the world, this one involved data collection right here at our university. The “N” was no longer anonymous. It was our students -- all of them. This created a higher degree of visibility and need for coordination with outside partners
