This is the summer of planning with a relatively long time horizon. Part of the reason for that is my reappointment to a second five year term as director; another component has to do with the enormous about of change that is happening this summer as a result of construction and turnover in scientific staff (we have lost two valued PI’s and gained three new ones). Certainly with the new space and the magnet, there are opportunities to recruit individuals that simply weren’t possible before.
One aspect of this long term planning that comes to mind this morning is how to take the vision for what we want to be, as an institute, to the next level. By this I mean, how do we take the areas in which we excel and subsequently take actions to become great in those areas. And as a corollary, how do we decide on what areas we excel in?
This line of thought leads me to think of sustainability, particularly in what is increasingly clearly a challenging federal funding environment. We are going to have to be qualitatively more entrepreneurial to sustain our research in the current biomedical federal funding climate.
Along the same lines, there is the need to continue to take risks. Risk averse institutes for advanced studies are an oxymoron. George Johnson, the science journalist, has called that sensibility a “fire in the mind”. How do we keep that fire burning?
Jim
Discoverers and Discoveries 