I noticed the other day that the original Institute for Advanced Study acts in some ways as a university with four academic units or schools. As the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study is an academic unit now of George Mason University, it then shouldn’t be too surprising that we’ll be standing up two new departments within the Institute in time for the next academic year. These will be a department of molecular neuroscience (which I will initially chair in addition to continuing to serve as institute director) and a department of social complexity (which Claudio Cioffi has agreed to chair). Of course there will continue to be Krasnow PI’s from other academic units and collaborative threads to the rest of Mason in addition to our sister institutions around the world. The two new departments will play key, but not sole roles in the two interdisciplinary doctoral programs: social complexity and neuroscience.
My vision is that the Institute will remain first and foremost, a center for research excellence, reaching across disciplinary divides, while at the same time playing an ever increasing role in graduate education at the intersection of neuroscience, cognitive psychology and computer sciences–all within the context of complex adaptive systems.
Discoverers and Discoveries 