This has been an extremely important year for the Krasnow Institute. But it also was a significant mile marker for me as I come to the end of my first term as Krasnow Director and prepare to commence my second term (which will end in May of 2012). My wife was remarking to me the other evening that I’m one of the few people she knows who really loves their job…and she was right. I’ve enjoyed just about every moment of my first term and I’m particularly grateful to the scientific community of the Institute for their support and enthusiasm towards our common goals.
For the Institute, this year marked the beginning of a new chapter at Mason as a full academic unit (holding our own faculty lines), the addition of 13,000 new square feet of labs and the opening of our MRI brain imaging center. Those are substantive changes for Krasnow. I’m confident that they are merely the prelude for a period of immense scientific productivity.
Our Decade of the Mind symposium next week is more or less contemporaneous with the University’s commencement exercises this year. It’s appropriate. The Decade of the Mind symposium marks the end a decade in the beautiful Krasnow Institute facility as well as the beginning of a new national enterprise to crack the mysteries of human higher cognition and perhaps consciousness.
We look forward to the end of a very successful academic year.
Jim
Discoverers and Discoveries 