Author: jlolds

Native Angeleno, professor of Neuroscience and Public Policy at George Mason University

Big Business and Research Universities

The link is to a NYTimes.com piece by G. Pascal Zachary….

Successful research universities are increasingly allowing corporate privileged access to their latest findings in science and technology. I know there are positives and negatives to this…those arguments have been back and forth for years. What’s interesting are the perspectives from the players and what this all means, not that it’s happening.

Money quote:

The appeal of these arrangements is that “we get broad engagement with universities,” says Andrew Chien, Intel’s director of research. “Their researchers work on frontiers, in unexplored territory. We want explorers.”

Intel hopes to learn more about scientific and technical developments that might influence its business, even decades from now. The company says it benefits from having its own employees rub shoulders with professors, while gaining the chance to observe younger talent in Ph.D. programs.

“You can view this as a pure pipeline,” says Chien, himself a former professor.

This is a perspective that I think has particular resonance for the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study and its various stakeholders and friends–particularly those in the private sector. One of the strategic directions that we’ll be heading in the next year will be towards building relationships like the ones Intel has with Berkeley, University of Washington and CMU.

Strategic thoughts–on holiday

I’m off to the mountains for the next two weeks. I hope to be thinking very strategically about the Institute as it heads into 2008 and the election cycle. From my standpoint, the key is aligning ourselves (from the standpoint of our scientific and educational activities) to the larger “weather” of the economy and government funding without compromising our scientific excellence. Not an easy task when that environment is as unstable as it appears to be right now.

As I’ve said before on this blog, ultimately we have to decide what not to do, given our finite size. Difficult, but tractable.

Jim

Krasnow growth

As we gathered for the annual holiday party and group photo earlier this week, I was struck by how much the Institute has grown over the past decade–there are so many Institute scientists, students and staff now, one faculty member pointed out that it’s no longer possible to even recognize everyone. That growth has manifested not only in people, but also in a host of other ways ranging from space, shared instrumentation, grants and published peer-review reports. Not to mention programs: it’s a true pleasure to interact with doctoral students from two programs–social complexity and neuroscience–as I walk around the Institute’s spaces.

Yes this growth brings with it real challenges. How do we manage the increased administrative work-load with an already over-worked staff? If budget permits, of course, we add folks, but those new individuals must be trained and that takes time–time that is already in short supply. At the same time, we are faced with the challenges of providing the shared instrumentation that is absolutely crucial to asking the scientific questions relevant to “mind sciences”. Finally, there is the critical task of building upon the critical mass of institute faculty with new faculty lines and (this is crucial) adequately resourcing those lines to be both market competitive and scientifically viable.

All of this brings me to the real challenge: developing an endowment for the Institute’s core activities (as distinct from those supported by research grants). An endowment which can supplement the state funds which we are generously provided by Mason and ultimately the Virginia tax-payer. To build that endowment will require a combination of support from individuals and foundations at least an order of magnitude beyond what we have been able to achieve since Mr. Krasnow’s founding bequest in 1990.

Building that endowment will require a compelling narrative. Part of the purpose of this blog has been to help me frame that narrative (over time) and I have found the comments from loyal readers to be of great usefulness in that process. Certainly our centrality within the new “Decade of the Mind” project should telegraph something about that nascent “elevator speech”. Stay tuned.

Jim

Two trends

The NIH internal review of how it gives grants out is out: among the key ideas: funding paradigm breaking research, funding more first-time investigators and telling people honestly when they have no chance ever of succeeding (on the basis of their scientific creativity or lack thereof).

Additionally, there’s the notion of how funding small science is changing–imagine a future where big science (think National Labs and huge well-established research teams) create the data sets which are then mined by small-scale individual PI’s using computational tools.

Jim

Dyslexia and business talent

Advisory Board member Tom West clued me in to the run on dyslexia stories in the media recently. Here’s today’s entry (also from the NY Times).

Money quote:

“We found that dyslexics who succeed had overcome an awful lot in their lives by developing compensatory skills,” Professor Logan said in an interview. “If you tell your friends and acquaintances that you plan to start a business, you’ll hear over and over, ‘It won’t work. It can’t be done.’ But dyslexics are extraordinarily creative about maneuvering their way around problems.”

Ipoding academic lectures and the role of NSF in the net

There are two excellent articles in today’s Sunday NY Times business section. The first by Anne Eisenberg is about using ipods in academic settings. This is an excellent idea that now goes beyond simply recording the video of the lecture and making it available (as in much of what’s on I-tunes U). Rather the software indexes every single word during the lecture and essentially creates a very sophisticated database of the content to go along with the video (and slides). Read it, I think this points the way to the future in academic education.

The second, by NY Times veteran John Markoff is about the history of the public-private partnership that birthed the modern commercial Internet twenty-years ago. Centered in Ann Arbor while I was in grad-school (an outfit called Merit with IBM and MCI as collaborators), it was an incredibly exciting time. I remember the first time I was able to send an email from Ann Arbor to Champaign–Urbana over the Internet, it seemed incredible. This was long before the web. It’s a history of a great success: read it also.

Jim

Snow in Washington DC

We had our first substantial snow of the season yesterday evening rush hour. Naturally, there were few salt trucks and plows–we’re not Chicago! I had the adventure of the month with my rear-wheel drive car–we took one of our job candidates to dinner, got stuck, subsequently the entire staff of the restaurant pushed us out (with the help of one of my faculty members and the job candidate). Ended up doing more 4-wheel skating than driving.

Jim