Goal

Building stronger and healthier societies begins with promoting and achieving infant flourishing. Many factors contribute to flourishing and are vital elements of the infant ecosystem including clinical, demographic, anthropometric, social, dietary, behavioral, spiritual, environmental, microbiome, virome, genomics, and developmental outcomes. The complex interactions of these components shape the infant ecosystem, which ultimately contribute to development and flourishing in adults. This idea seeks to advance infant developmental research via eco-systems biology approaches. Through integrating diverse datasets, many rarely or never collected for infants, interdisciplinary teams that draw lessons from large-scale consortium-style science efforts will more holistically define, model, and promote infant flourishing.
Specific opportunities lie in well-sampled daycare settings, particularly those capturing the 'pandemic experiment' whereby reduced inter-human contact offer a grand social experiment for understanding flourishing. Daycare centers are complex ecosystems and current studies are severely under-powered to holistically understand the infant ecosystem to the point of predicting child and adult flourishing. If we can better understand the intricate interplay of the infant ecosystem and its impacts on development, then we can expect to identify early interventions that positively support the healthy development of infants and ultimately contribute to a flourishing society.

Opportunity

Infant development is heavily studied. However, traditional studies are largely conducted independently due to the challenges and scale of holistic approaches. For example, researchers investigating infant social and emotional development may observe interpersonal interactions, but neglect infectious diseases, the microbiome, and relevant environmental context. Notably, soil and ocean researchers facing similar challenges have converged towards large consortium-style projects that span genes-to-ecosystems and helped establish a new 'Science of Team Science' discipline. Leveraging these approaches to build the first consortium-scale infant development studies will accelerate understanding into the intricacies of the infant ecosystem and its impacts on development and infant flourishing.

Roadblocks

Consortium-scale science is expensive but has been piloted in biomedical sciences (Human Microbiome Project) and environment sciences (Tara Oceans Consortium). Based on these pilots, several challenges with consortium-scale science have been identified, including:
• Difficulty recruiting diverse expertise to ensure:
o A team approach (researchers, modelers, educators) to sample design and interpretation
o Appropriate collection and curation of samples and diverse metadata
o Analysis of multimodal longitudinal data sets
o Management and integration of big data
• Lack of shared language for communication between and across disciplines
• Lack of traditional funding mechanisms
• Effort required for consortium project management

Breakthroughs Needed

While there will be challenges, and currently no funding agencies can support such an exploratory effort, a privately funded eco-systems biology approach will be transformative to understand infant development and flourishing. A roadmap for how to do this exists from environmental researchers (e.g. Tara Oceans Consortium).
A key step is assembling a global team of investigators from diverse disciplines to form an international "Integrated Infant Ecosystem" consortium. This team should include, but is not limited, to the following experts: child developmental specialists, psychologists, pediatricians, anthropologists, microbiologists, virologists, microbiome scientists, epidemiologists, infectious disease experts, immunologists, translational data scientists, and biostatisticians. A yearly symposium could help foster collaborative opportunities within the consortium, including structured working groups and hands-on trainings. Training topics should include: science communication, team science skills, and trainee transdisciplinary training.
Another key step would be the availability of pilot grant funding. Specific grant calls could be used to generate interest and demonstrate feasibility of team science in this space. Once the "Integrated Infant Ecosystem" consortium is established, grant funding should be directed to projects that utilize the curated comprehensive dataset to explore and address other scientific questions related to the infant ecosystem.

Key Indicators of Success

3 years: Did exploratory grants lead to assembly of interdisciplinary teams? Can diverse cohorts of infants be recruited and followed longitudinally? Did we generate linked multimodal streams of data that can be queried? ('No' indicates failure).
5 years: Did curation of the comprehensive database and data integration lead to new research ideas for interdisciplinary projects?
10 years: Was a framework for evaluating flourishing in the infant ecosystem across transdisciplines developed? Is the Integrated Infant Ecosystem Consortium addressing ongoing scientific questions? Did any grants lead to innovations that support infant flourishing? ('Yes' indicates success but 'no' may not necessarily indicate failure)