I’m pleased to report that two new PI’s will be joining Krasnow in the Fall: Ted Dumas (from University of Oregon) and Rob Cressman (from Penn State). As with previous years they will be invited to be “guest bloggers” so that our readers can learn about their research. In the meantime, we welcome them and look forward to an enriched Krasnow scientific community.

Jim

I spent yesterday on Capitol Hill mostly on behalf of the Society for Neuroscience. It’s finally warming up in Washington and so the flowers and trees were in full bloom. The message to our legislators was to support biomedical research, particularly through a 6.7% increase in the NIH budget. That’s the amount that will simply allow the NIH to maintain its “science purchasing” power against the biomedical inflation index (which is much higher typically than the economy’s inflation).

I also got to remind staffers about he upcoming Decade of the Mind symposium here at George Mason. There is a lot of excitement building for that event.

Jim

Here’s an interesting finding: Miller and Sweatt have demonstrated that DNA methylation (essentially dynamic covalent modifications of genes) plays a crucial role in hippocampal fear conditioning. It’s published in NEURON. I linked to the Faculty of 1000 citation for those who don’t have access to the journal.

The significance is that the genome itself can be modified and essentially serve as an engram. This is a really old idea, but this new wrinkle gives the notion new life.

Jim

RIM’s blackberry servers have been down since last evening. This is the service that kept going during 9/11 and that much of the federal government uses. I have a blackberry also. Makes me wonder how much to count on it in the future. Of course, it’s kind of nice to give my thumbs a rest.

One of the real challenges for the Institute going forward is to leverage our current imaging technologies for scientific discovery while at the same time, taking the calculated risks on what the next significant technologies will be for the field.

In the area of simple system models (like Alpysia or Drosophila), one of the huge challenges has been to create a functional map of the entire nervous system. Here is one approach that I think might be fruitful. I’ve always been interested in the aequoerin as a calcium reporter because it signals with a photon in the visual spectrum at very high temporal resolution. It always seemed like it might be an ideal way to look at the activation of protein kinase C (which typically needs Ca2+ for activation) at high levels of temporal resolution within living cells.

Jim

Our hearts go out to students and faculty at Virginia Tech where tragedy struck today. The loss of life is horrific. I just received word from the director of our sister institute, VBI, that all of their folks are OK.

All of us at Krasnow send our condolences to colleagues, friends and relatives at Tech.

Jim

A delightful afternoon as friends of the Krasnow Institute enjoyed the Verizon Executive Box to watch the Wizards play the Bulls. Outside the Verizon Center the winds were howling as a Nor’easter roared through the Washington area. But inside, we got into the game as the play-off bound Wizards lost to the Chicago Bulls.

This is the link to find out about the symposium and register.

Jim

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.

It certainly now looks like the next phase of the Krasnow Expansion (Phase II) will happen. This will double the 13,000 sq. foot addition that we are taking delivery of in the next month or so. That would have the Institute topping off at about 50,000 sq. feet which seems just about right. I’ll have more details as they become available.

Jim