In Aurora C# the "Leader Teams" where abolished (which I think was great), but one of the side-effects it that it led to a big surplus of scientists where you'll usually have 3 or 4 scientists with the same specializations but only use the best one. An extreme example would be the game I just started, where I began as a Conventional empire with 8 labs and 22 scientists
So I was thinking about how to put them to use and also make research a bit more interesting and arrived at the following proposal:
Instead of being allocated multiple labs, each scientist would man only a single lab. Research projects would be done by a head scientist's lab, which would be allocated other supporting labs. The Administration Rating of scientists would be on steps of 1 (instead of 5) and would indicate how many labs (including its own) that scientist can manage as a project lead (a Rating 1 scientist would only be able to work on a project alone, a Rating 2 would be able to have one assistant lab, etc). There could also be Rating 0 scientists who would not be able to be project leads themselves but would be able to assist other scientists until they get more experienced, and you could also put labs without scientists as supporting labs though those would not get any research bonus. And of course, labs allocated for support must be on the same body as their lead's lab.
This would give a purpose for having lots of redundant specialty scientists, and I also believe it would make research more interesting as players would be forced to spread out their research more instead of pouring all their labs into one or two projects and beelining stuff. It would most likely also require a rebalancing of Research Points and Research Costs though.