Category: George Mason University

Institute Expansion Project

Here’s a photo from within the new expansion project looking south. In the foreground is Phase I and the new chillers. In the background you can make out the signature two story windows of the Great Room. Our trees are still bare. They’ll be greening up when we take delivery in the Spring.

Phase I and Phase II together make up a larger massing than the original Krasnow Institute facility. Together, they’ll have approximately 30,000 square feet of wet-labs and associated support lab/shared instrumentation space on three floors.

In total, the Institute will encompass nearly 55,000 square feet with over 100 associated scientists, trainees and staff. We still have a center and one of our academic departments in a satellite facility on the Mason campus. Eventually, we’ll bring those folks in also, with a Phase III addition on the south side of the original building.

Krasnow’s mission continues to center on the intersection of neuroscience, cognitive psychology and computer sciences. We conduct convergent research and we train new scientists to do the same.

Annual Planning Conference–George Mason

Just got back from our annual planning conference–this year held on campus at the brand new Mason Inn and Conference Center (which we’ll be using for our executive short courses next summer). Take away message: the University is in good shape. I found my colleagues to be enthused and full of energy about the new academic year. There is a strong consensus for combining the strengths of a major research university with an institution dedicated to excellent teaching, and the notion of students as scholars, not just learners, as a way to differentiate ourselves going forward.

Heading Past Third Base on Summer

We’re only about four weeks out from the beginning of the Fall semester here at George Mason.  Already, you can feel the campus gearing up. Today at Academic Council we went over the University’s QEP (Quality Enhancement Plan) to substantially increase undergraduate participation in scholarship and creativity over the next years. This is quite exciting to me because of how clearly valuable undergraduate research experiences are to the success of future scientists. Both at NIH and at the MBL, I got to see this first hand. Good science is inherently a creative endeavor. And when one experiences creative science during the undergraduate years, science becomes a passion.

In the meantime, I’m headed to Woods Hole next week. What’s not to love about that?

Commencement and new beginnings

Tomorrow morning is Commencement at George Mason University. As in so many previous years, I’ll arrive early at the Institute, don my academic regalia and walk across the campus lawns to the Patriot Center to join the platform party and mark the end of another academic year.

The carnival of academic regalia reflects the diversity of our faculty, my own bears the markings of the University of Michigan where I received my doctorate. But those of us on the faculty, as we enter the arena, will be swamped by the sea of green, as thousands of Mason students prepare to begin the rest of their lives.
In the end, it’s the ability to positively influence the education of thousands of students, that is the core mission of this large public university. Teaching, this past semester, to both undergraduates and doctoral students, I felt energized by this core mission in a way that both invigorates my own efforts here at Mason as an administrator and that gets leveraged into my role as a science leader at this institute for advanced study.
Already, only the seniors are left on Mason’s campus, some 12 miles from the U.S. Capitol Building. After tomorrow, we’ll settle into the summer routine–for administrators, things only gradually begin to wind down–but I already can’t wait for the Fall semester and the challenges that await: working with my graduate students on research, building out Phase II in our expansion project, teaching undergraduate neuroscience and continuing to edit a 100+ year old scientific journal called The Biological Bulletin.
I feel energized by what’s ahead, just as I feel satisfaction in what’s now past. And I continue to consider this, the best job anyone could hope to have.
Jim

Mason Commencement 2009

Tomorrow morning, I’ll get up early and drive from Arlington to the Fairfax campus. I’ll park at the Institute and walk across the Mason campus in my University of Michigan academic regalia –FYI the trademark “M” isn’t a part of the get up–to join with colleagues at the Patriot Center, putting a full stop on the academic year that began last August. Commencement paradoxically derives from the verb to commence, but ends the academic year rather than beginning it. To my mind, that’s because commencement exercises aren’t about the faculty or the deans, but rather about the graduating students, who now are about to commence their post-degree lives.

And that thought brings back the memory of an earlier commencement day in May of 1978 in the main quadrangle of Amherst College. On that day, long before there were such things as the Web or Iphones, it was hot and muggy, the sun shown bright. The black cap and gown was hot. As I recall, many of my fellow graduating seniors wore, additionally, the green, red and yellow arm band which protested apartheid in South Africa. The College President John William Ward had been arrested for protesting the Vietnam War at the local airbase; I vividly remember receiving my diploma from his hand under his stern New England gaze and then it was done–I was off to commence my own life, one that initially took me to Capitol Hill and later to graduate school in Ann Arbor–and finally here to Mason, where I’m completing my 11th academic year, and watching our graduating seniors commence their journey.
To all of them, good luck!
Jim

Impressions of the Ohio State campus

I had visited Ohio State before, but this past weekend my brother-in-law was kind enough to offer up a very comprehensive tour of the Columbus campus. With Ann Arbor as my baseline for what a Big Ten university looks like, the contrasts were quite interesting.

Above all, the Ohio State campus stands geographically distinct from the Columbus in a way that the Michigan campus does not from Ann Arbor. This creates a coherence that I found very positive. I was also struck by the large number of enormous state-of-the-art athletic facilities which range from the iconic football stadium to a 21st century student recreational facility that might be orbiting the earth (think 2001 A Space Odyssey) were it not linked very firmly to the ground.
The Medical School/Hospital complex is part of the overall campus complex–it is both heterogeneous and modern. Oh, and I forgot, also elephantine. I wonder if it is making money (profitable university hospitals are a rare commodity these days).
But the student dorms were clearly in stasis. Compared with the gorgeous spanking brand new residence halls at George Mason, these were pretty much unchanged from when they were built at various points in the last century–at least on the outside. That would seem to be an important area for the campus to invest in. And perhaps…that’s in the works. A huge new student union was under construction. With a large new union, new dorms would logically follow.
Jim