In contrast to the typical university department, the scientist leaders of Krasnow are termed “principal investigators”. This term of course derives from the world of grants, where a PI is the legally accountable spender-in-chief for the direct costs associated with an award (and also for her laboratory, the “decider”). At Krasnow however, the term means something considerably more complex. For one thing, it reflects the seniority (based upon research) to participate in the decisions that reflect the direction of the Institute as a whole–such has recruitment of new PI’s, selection of seminar series speakers and mentorship issues. On another level, it reflect the independence of the PI as far as their research is concerned. Thus, crucially, the PI initiates research at Krasnow.

Every semester, the Krasnow PI’s gather for lunch, as a group, to discuss the direction of the Institute. At the last such gathering, we dined at a small Turkish restaurant in Fairfax, I was struck by how collegial this group has become over the years. And this is also an important component of what it means to be a Krasnow PI: to be a colleague of ones fellow PI’s. Krasnow PI’s collaborate with one another, and when they aren’t collaborating, they serve as scientific sounding boards for one another.

Most of Krasnow’s PI’s are also university faculty members at George Mason. These two roles are distinct from one another, although they are very complementary: research is a crucial criterion for promotion and tenure. So very often, a Krasnow PI is also a professor in some academic unit of the University (Krasnow isn’t an academic unit by-the-way). Thus a Krasnow PI usually has to balance teaching and departmental service obligations with a life of scientific research at the Institute–and this isn’t always trivial.

An odd item: there are no titles on the office name plates at Krasnow. So PI status is a bit murky. But I think in whole, that ambiguity on the door labels makes for a more open scientific atmosphere here at the Institute. Students and postdocs wander in with new ideas, and ultimately those ideas are the engine of science.

Happy 4th of July,

Jim

Be sure, if you can,  to check out Evan Ratliff’s very interesting article in today’s Sunday New York Times magazine. I’m more inclined towards the mini-seizure theory than anything else.

Money quote:
“Could ordinary déjà vu be a minor version of the same thing, a brief misfire in a temporal-lobe circuit that sets off the feeling of remembering? “Somebody like A.K.P. shows that there is this sensation that is separate from memory,” Moulin told me. “If his can go chronically wrong, ours can go momentarily wrong.”

It’s good to be home although the city is still recovering from its unprecidented bath–something on the order of 12.5 inches in four days at Reagan National Airport. Our house, near the Potomac’s Chain Bridge, seems to be fine. For the Fourth, we’ll be joining friends who have chartered a boat to cruise the River past the monuments as the fireworks illuminate them. I hope for good weather.

I’m very pleased that the June  issue of The Biological Bulletin is out and we’ve made it free. It’s a special “virtual symposium” on marine invertebrate models of learning and memory–the notion being that if we can understand the mechanisms of learning in a simple system of say, 10,000 neurons, perhaps we’ll get insight into the mechanisms that subserve learning in our own brains with one hundred billion nerve cells. Kudos to issue editors Donna McPhie and Mark Miller for a spectacular job!

I’m at a meeting sponsored by Sandia National Labs here at the famous La Fonda hotel in Santa Fe. Last night I had dinner with two colleagues from the Santa Fe Institute where the discussion moved broadly across disciplines from Dennet’s views on religion to Jeff Hawkins new view of how the neocortex works. At the meeting itself there was a really interesting set of talks on the new quantum dot technology, which just now seems to be maturing to where it can be of practical use in cellular neuroscience. All of this in the absolutely unique milieu of Santa Fe–another place (like Woods Hole or La Jolla) where science is the lingua franca.

Today back across the country via Chicago to Washington where the rain storm of the last two hundred years has finally ended.

Jim

I’ll be on the road for the next couple of days and probably wont be blogging (it’s possible but not enjoyable to blog from a blackberry). Here in DC we had the most rain in a 24 hour period since 1871! So it’s a small miracle to find the Institute intact and dry this morning. In the meantime, I bring your attention to a very useful article addressing one of the major risks facing high-achievers as they go on the job market.

I had the honor of participating this afternoon in a joint venture of Howard University and University of Texas El Paso–the 3rd Preparing Future Faculty (PFF)Institute here in DC on the campus of Howard. My talk was on the value of multidisciplinary research but in discussions with the students, we covered everything from mentoring to potassium channels and then on to social complexity models. Kudos to Terrolyn P. Carter who has been coordinator of the Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate and the Preparing Future Faculty Programs at Howard and to Orlando Taylor, Howard’s Vice Provost for Research and Dean of the graduate school there.

To the students I met, thank you for your great feedback and I look forward to continuing the dialog virtually.

Jim

The Krasnow Institute has had a long-term and quite intellectually deep relationship with the Santa Fe Institute. In fact, it would be accurate to say that SFI played a key role in the founding of Krasnow since the symposium, “The Mind, The Brain, and Complex Adaptive Systems”, sponsored by Santa Fe and George Mason University in May of 1993 directly led to the current Krasnow Institute scientific program (click on the link above). Currently there are direct links between the two institutes at the board and scientific advisory board levels: we are indeed sister institutes.

Krasnow also has less formal ties to other institutes (of similar scientific scope). In many cases, these links are simply research collaborations, or reified as individual scientists who have spent time at both places.

In the future, we’ll be moving quite significantly to increase our international institutional ties and, most importantly, will be offering opportunities for scholars seeking to use their sabbatical time in extended visits to Krasnow. This fits very much with one of the original ideas for the Institute: to populate it almost exclusively with visiting scholars–an idea that was ultimately rejected, but also one with many good attributes for promoting scientific discovery.

Jim

I spent three years in the mid-90’s working as the Executive Director
of a scientific society. It was an interesting detour in my career–I
learned about everything from event planning to government affairs–by
the seat of my pants, and definitely without a license. Fortunately I
was lucky enough to have some excellent mentors–and particularly for
those trips to Capitol Hill, the friendship of two former
congressional staff members who were nice enough to tutor me in what
to say to a member of congress (and more importantly what not to say).

One of the most interesting aspects of my job was actually
heading up a 501(c)3 nonprofit and having to learn to get along with a
governance board (in scientific societies termed “council” but acting
as a board of directors). For nonprofits, there are several models for
governance–I suppose it was lucky, given my relative inexperience,
that our model was strong board-weak CEO. I was to learn however that
in practice a model with greater equality between the CEO and the
board is typically best for the organization.

That scientific society was also where I cut my teeth on building a
web site, working with databases and developing the interpersonal
skills that I find myself using, even as an academic administrator
here at George Mason.

Most importantly, those years gave me the experience which most active
faculty scientists never have: learning how difficult and complex the
work of crafting science policy can be–and how it’s rarely the folks
in the limelight who have done the most challenging of the work.

Jim

The foundation slab for the new Krasnow expansion is being laid down as of today. Please excuse the concrete trucks!

Jim

We’ve had a great seminar series at Krasnow for a number of years now. We’re always looking for new suggestions on good speakers–generally we’re looking for researchers who are doing work in the general research domain of the Institute. I’d like to throw open this blog for suggestions for the upcoming Fall series. If you use the blog to nominate someone (or yourself), please include appropriate links (to homepages for example) and please let us know why you think your suggestion would be interesting to the Krasnow audience.

Jim