I am a PhD student seeking to collarborate with PhD student/professors from other department. How can I make this happen? I am a PhD student seeking to collaborate with PhD student/professors from other department.
I have never made such an initiative before, and I lack the general idea on how to start.
In particular:

If I already have some specific research questions in mind (which I will use for my dissertation research), is it important to ensure that the research lab is a reasonable match to my specific research goals? For example, if my field is natural language processing and I am specifically interested in doing a research in Transformer language models, should I ensure that the potential research lab for collaboration is also heavily into Transformer research? or can I try contacting any natural language processing labs in general, even if the lab's subarea of research is not a great match to my research goals?

My main supervisor is open to the idea of collaboration. To make the collaboration to happen, can I just contact the individual researcher/PhD student whom I am interested in working with? or should I first contact the professor who is leading the lab that the researcher/PhD student belongs to?

Should my main supervisor contact the research group on my behalf, instead of me approaching them?

If I collaborate with a research lab in different department, does this automatically mean that I will formally be a member of that research lab and have the professor who is leading the lab as my co-supervisor?

Is it okay for PhD student to collaborate with research labs from different university (assuming that my main supervisor is okay with this)?


Thank you,
Yes, go for it.  It sounds like a great idea.
Regarding your formal status with the other labs you collaborate with, as a grad student you could be considered more appropriately as an &quot;intern&quot; for them, which is not in the usual sense of the word, in terms of responsibilities, but I've seen the term used a lot in academia for researchers collaborating at other labs.