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Practice and research collaborations in the disaster domain have the potential to improve emergency management practices while also advancing disaster science theory. However, they also pose challenges as practitioners and researchers each have their own culture, history, values, incentives, and processes that do not always facilitate collaboration. In this paper, we reflect on a 6-month practice and research collaboration, where researchers and practitioners worked together to craft a social media monitoring system for emergency managers in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The challenges we encountered in this project fall into two broad categories, job-related and timescale challenges. Using prior research on team science as a guide, we discuss several challenges we encountered in these two categories and show how our team sought to overcome them. We conclude with a set of best practices for improving practice and research collaborations. 

During the onset of COVID-19, leadership from the Montgomery County, Maryland Community Emergency Response Team (MCCERT) initiated its Virtual Emergency Response Team (VERT) program to train an artificial intelligence-based automated system to rapidly attain pandemic-related content communicated on Twitter. The system, ‘CitizenHelper’, was developed under a National Science Foundation-funded project housed at George Mason University.