The Next Five Years (II)

Any discussion of where we are headed must inevitably begin with a discussion of from where we have come. When I came on board as Krasnow Director in July of 1998, the amount of sponsored research at the Institute was less than $100,000. Freshly moved into our brand new facility there were sixteen people on staff (including all PI’s, postdocs and students). An early version of our website can be found here with the announcement of one our our first grants–a private award from the Whitaker Foundation. In the space of the following eight years, we have grown: the Institute has brought in over $16M in sponsored research, there are now 60 staff members and the Institute is now the de facto locus of two doctoral Ph.D. programs and ten research centers, cores or laboratories. The scientific alumni of the Institute are now in senior scientific positions around the world and our scientific success has been covered in the national and international media and at the highest levels of government.
Along the way, the constant was our seminar series which had begun in 1994. Here is the archived calendar of the seminar series from that first year. Over the next twelve years the Krasnow seminar series brought an always interesting set of talks to Fairfax on topics ranging from American Sign Language from the standpoint of cognitive neuroscience to the representation of odors in the rodent olfactory bulb. The current calendar can be found here.
Looking back, I would say that there were two major punctuation markers in the history of the Institute up to the current point. The first occurred with the transition of directors and the move in to the current facility over the 1997-1998 year. The second occurred in 2002, when the Institute successfully merged into George Mason University. We now stand at the threshold of the third of these markers–the construction of Krasnow Phase II and the opening of our Brain Imaging Center. In the next blog entry I will continue this discussion, but now focusing exclusively on the future.