Last week’s science retreat was an excellent opportunity to get a broad brush strokes picture of what we are doing as a whole. I was particularly impressed by the shear quantity of excellent new data from clearly well-conceived experiments across a large domains of science. One great addition this year, was allowing more junior investigators (eg. postdoctoral fellows and graduate students) to present as well as principal investigators. It’s great watching new scientists get excited about their experiments.
I was also very pleased because there is now real balance in the Krasnow science portfolio. With the addition of Claudio Cioffi’s Center on Social Complexity combined with Ken DeJong’s Adaptive Systems Laboratory, the Venn Diagram that was in the mind’s eye of our founders (an intersection of neuroscience, computer science, and cognitive psychology/behavioral biology) is considerably more reified. This allows us to approach the subject of “cognition” from multiple disciplinary directions at the same time and, I hope, will eventually lead to some very fruitful collaborative discoveries.
Jim
Discoverers and Discoveries 