Welcome to the the 2008-2009 Academic Year

A week from today, the Institute for Advanced Study parking lot will be jammed with parents unloading their children’s stuff–we’re adjacent to the freshman dorms here at George Mason University–and so the beginning of the academic year is unmistakable for us.

I have just returned to campus from the annual two-day President’s Council/Board of Visitor’s retreat. It’s an entirely useful exercise that informs me of the entire waterfront of activities going on at this very large public university. Beyond informing, it also is wonderful for getting into the right frame-of-mind to begin another academic year as Institute Director.

For the Institute, this marks the beginning of our eighteenth year, and our sixth since fully merging into George Mason. I count approximately 60 scientific staff, 7 administrative support folks (including myself) and two wonderful doctoral programs that fill our halls and break-out places with students. We have finished our first expansion project (we’re now approximately 35,000 square feet) and we’re going to commence the second expansion sometime during this academic year (another 12,000 or so square feet).

Most importantly, we’re doing significant science–advanced studies–at the forefront of the interface between biology, psychology and machines–“mind sciences”. Throughout my travels this past summer, I find myself reminding: I may be a neuroscientist, but I lead an institute for advanced study.

So let’s focus on the trans-disciplinary science that our illustrious founders chose as putatively fruitful–cognition across the intersection of computer sciences, neurobiology and cognitive psychology.

Good luck for a successful year!

Jim

The Chronicle weighs in on provostial teas

I know it’s behind the firewall, but if you get a chance, it’s well worth the read. Money quote:

Several times a semester, Peter N. Stearns invites a couple of dozen faculty members to join him for tea and cookies in the administration building at George Mason University. During teatimes, Mr. Stearns, the provost, takes questions and listens to professors’ suggestions. Sometimes, he says, professors share “imaginative approaches” to teaching that he then passes along to others.

Mr. Stearns believes that the teas have opened up communication with professors and are the kind of thing that leads employees to rank George Mason highly when it comes to relations between faculty members and administrators.

The provost says administrators at George Mason also try to react quickly when professors have good ideas. “If a faculty member comes to me or the president or a dean and says, ‘I’ve got this idea,’ our systematic reaction is: That’s great. Let’s make it work.” Just six months ago, a professor told the provost he wanted to create a center to help third-world countries enhance information security. Administrators gave the OK, and the International Cyber Center was born. The professor who started it is already planning the center’s first conference.

Mason makes the Sunday NY Times

The subject matter is the current explosion of international campuses for American universities. Mason is an important case study in the piece.

Money quote:

While the Persian Gulf campus of N.Y.U. is on the horizon, George Mason University is up and running — though not at full speed — in Ras al Khaymah, another one of the emirates.

George Mason, a public university in Fairfax, Va., arrived in the gulf in 2005 with a tiny language program intended to help students achieve college-level English skills and meet the university’s admission standards for the degree programs that were beginning the next year.

George Mason expected to have 200 undergraduates in 2006, and grow from there. But it enrolled nowhere near that many, then or now. It had just 57 degree students — 3 in biology, 27 in business and 27 in engineering — at the start of this academic year, joined by a few more students and programs this semester.

The project, an hour north of Dubai’s skyscrapers and 7,000 miles from Virginia, is still finding its way. “I will freely confess that it’s all been more complicated than I expected,” said Peter Stearns, George Mason’s provost.

The Ras al Khaymah campus has had a succession of deans. Simple tasks like ordering books take months, in part because of government censors. Local licensing, still not complete, has been far more rigorous than expected. And it has not been easy to find interested students with the SAT scores and English skills that George Mason requires for admissions.

“I’m optimistic, but if you look at it as a business, you can only take losses for so long,” said Dr. Abul R. Hasan, the academic dean, who is from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. “Our goal is to have 2,000 students five years from now. What makes it difficult is that if you’re giving the George Mason degree, you cannot lower your standards.”

Fall Semester 2007

Summer is now winding down at Krasnow, and the usual “early-onset” George Mason University semester is only a few weeks away. With the end of summer, and the promise of cooler and less humid weather in the Washington DC area, the faculty and students begin to return from their summer travels and the lights in the Institute will begin to burn late late into the night again as experiments are run, brains are scanned and manuscripts are prepared for publication.

This new academic year marks the formal beginning of the Institute’s George Mason role as a full academic unit. This in addition to continuing as an institute for advanced study. It will be interesting and challenging to see how both of those missions blend. Most important will be the need to keep focusing on advanced science–science the challenges the paradigm.

Jim

As the new semester nears….

It’s the end of July and already around DC the first leaves are beginning to show evidence of Fall color changes. At this time of year, those early reminders of the impending semester are always a bit disconcerting. I’ll be off to Woods Hole next week to focus on The Biological Bulletin. Shortly after I return, Mason’s administration will have its annual planning conference retreat and following a quick trip to Iowa for a meeting of The Great Apes Trust scientific advisory board, I’ll be returning to a new semester and even some teaching responsibilities.

Summer does indeed fly by in academia.

This Fall, Krasnow will welcome two new PI’s, two new doctoral cohorts (for Neuroscience and Social Complexity) and open our new building wing with its state-of-the-art labs. I’m really excited. At the same time, we’ll be going into the planning process for the next wing of the building, new searches and the next “Decade of the Mind” events (which I’ll have more to report on here soon).

I’ll end by reporting that, in spite of climatic reputations, the weather in Salzburg was considerably hotter than it’s been in Washington since I’ve returned–is it due to Climate Change?

Jim

What is the relationship between Krasnow and Mason Neuroscience

I’m discovering, over the last year, that this is a major source of confusion. And it’s easy to see why: a whole lot of Mason neuroscience (but not all) is housed at Krasnow.

So here’s my take:

Mason neuroscience right now consists of two doctoral programs (neuroscience and biopsychology), a P&T granting Program in SCS (Computational Neuroscience) and a critical mass of neuroscientist faculty members who conduct research. If we’re lucky, over the next several years, these elements (or at least most of them) might coalesce into a single neuroscience department in the new College of Science. I think that would be very good for neuroscience at Mason, not the least because it would make our story easier to understand for outsiders, but also because it would potentially open the door for an undergraduate neuroscience major…and that major could definitely strengthen Mason’s premed offerings.

Krasnow, on the other hand, is a research unit, albeit a unique one that operates university-wide under the office of the Provost (like the other academic units). There are activities at Krasnow, crucial to its long term scientific mission which, most definitely aren’t neuroscience. For example: evolutionary algorithms and agent based modeling. Another example: the emergence of the metabolic chart from the basic laws of physics. Finally, we’re soon to be very heavily involved in computational social science.

The institute was chartered with a scientific mission to operate at the intersection of neuroscience, behavioral biology and computer science. It was the likes of Herb Simon, Murray Gell-Mann and Julie Axelrod who came up with that. So while, we are most definitely growing our strength in neuroscience, it’s useful to keep in mind that the Institute, needs to also tend its garden in these other areas.

Why?

It’s my sense that this intersection may play a crucial role in achieving, eventually, a very deep understanding of higher human cognition with the context of the universe as a whole. And to me, that is the most interesting question.