Less awkward word or phrase for "university community"

I'd like to refer to a group of people that includes professors and PhD students that I worked with on a particular project. Me being not part of that community.

Is it ok just to say "We collaborated with the XYZ university community" or "with a group of people from the XYZ university"?

Is it ok just to say "We collaborated with the XYZ university community" or "with a group of people from the XYZ university"?

A group of people working together on a project (esp. a research project) is often referred to as a team:

• two or more people working together : a team of researchers

^{New Oxford American Dictionary}

I would suggest "We collaborated with a team of researchers from XYZ university" or "We collaborated with an artificial intelligence research team from XYZ university".

You could probably use something like "with members of the XYZ university academic community".

You can't just say "with the university's academic community", because in this case, you didn't collaborate with the whole of the university's academic community.)

For example, see 'The role of academic community in higher learning', http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Paper/Graham/acad_com.htm

University community is far too broad, incorporating essentially the entire university or all of academia.

There are many possibilities when the scope of the collaboration is a project or program. For example:

• If you collaborated on a project with a single professor (Professor Smith, say) and that professor's postdocs, Ph.D. students, research assistants, etc., you could/would say, "I collaborated with the Smith (research) group at University X on Project Y" or "I collaborated with the [insert subject-matter area] (research) group at University X on Project Y"

• If you collaborated with multiple professors, and their postdocs, PhD. students, etc. at a single university on a shared project, you could/would say, "I participated in Project X at University Y." If that project was part of a larger program, or conducted in a "center" devoted to research in a particular subject-matter area, e.g., nanotechnology, you could/would say, "I collaborated with the nanotechnology program at University X on Project Y" or "I collaborated with the nanotechnology center at University X on Project Y."

• If you collaborated on a project that involved professors, postdocs, etc. from multiple universities, you could/would most likely reference the name of the project/program and the name of the entity, e.g., center, under whose auspices the project/program was established/conducted.

If I had more information, I could be more specific.