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

A very interesting report in Nature suggesting that the Hodgkin Huxley view of action potential generation may be qualitatively incorrect. The evidence in the article based on in vivo and in vitro measurements of the the dynamics of action potential initiation. Bottom line: sodium channels may be acting cooperatively with one another. What would be the mechanism?

Jim

I know of a sitting provost who has published a multitude of books in his field and continues to do so, at a blistering pace. I know of an NIH director, who, during his entire successful tenure, maintained a very active lab and research group. I know of a medical school department chair, who is as immersed in signal transduction data (from his own laboratory) as I was as a young post doc.

Successful science administrators are very often active in their research groups, if not the actual lab bench. Why is that? The skills of science administration, at first analysis, while requiring perhaps some understanding of science (and the relevant fields for the job) do not seem to overlap with those of a working scientist.

However, I suspect that maintaining an active research program enhances one’s credibility with the scientists who are being managed. I also think that being active in research may facilitate the “walking around” component of leadership (i.e. informal meetings outside of the director’s office) because conversations can at least start off in the enjoyable domain of science before per chance evolving into more stodgy domains such as space utilization.

About that NIH director: we may have disagreed with his decisions about our lives on campus, but we all grudgingly gave him his dues as a top notch scientist.

Jim

Yesterday we completed our first human scans–on volunteers Professors Kalbfleisch and McCabe–the joint co-chairs of Neuroimaging Core of the Krasnow Institute (click on the link). So things are now rapidly moving along.

One of my favorite journals has always been Behavioral and Brain Sciences with its target articles followed by peer-reviewed commentary

Aside: For an excellent example, check out Shors and Matzel’s “Long-term Potentiation: What’s learning got to do with it?” 20:597 (1997).

In any case, the Public Library of Science now has something similar in the works that will be called PLoS ONE (click the link above).

Money quote:
“With PLoS ONE, papers need no longer be static markers in an ongoing process of scientific discovery, but the beginning of a conversation between authors and readers alike. Authors looking back on papers written 6 months or a year ago may see things that they would have written differently; new data may have arisen to strengthen or alter some of the conclusions. PLoS ONE will provide authors with opportunities to make those changes and so acknowledge the evolution of their ideas. This will not alter the scientific record–the original paper is still the original paper–but authors and readers can build upon it. And anyone with an interest can read and benefit from this.”

Over the next year I intend to evolve the Krasnow Director’s Blog in two
ways: First, I would like to open the blog up significantly, both for
comments, track-back, and for guest bloggers. The hope is that we can keep
things reasonably focused on science and the Institute while at the same
time creating more of a forum for ideas. I’m particularly looking for
input on the long-term future of Krasnow, as this will be the transition
year between my first and second terms as director.

Second, I plan to link more extensively to other content, and hope that my
commenters and guest bloggers will do the same. One of the powers of a
good blog is the inherent ability to reference other material in support
of an argument.

We have actually four new PI’s coming on board over the summer. As I
mentioned, I’ll ask each of them to contribute here. Perhaps that can
serve as a begining to this new phase of the director’s blog.

Jim

This blog is now a year old. What started as an experiment has turned into a key communications tool although there is clearly room for useful improvement and evolution. Today, I put forward some thoughts on what I’ve learned from the process. Tomorrow I’ll address where I’d like to go with the Krasnow Director’s Blog over the next 12 months.

My initial idea was that it would be a good idea to have a place on the web where Institute colleagues could go to gain insight into the decision processes of this office. The notion was that the blog would supplement an office open-door policy in terms of communicating with Krasnow Staff.

An additional initial goal, was to facilitate Krasnow staff participation in the various expansion and construction projects–essentially to serve as a virtual “town meeting” for concerns about the slated growth of the institute.

What turned out however, was that a fairly large percentage of the repeating visitors were from outside the Institute or even the University. These were often visitors from peer institutes and research facilities from around the world.

So then the purpose of this blog evolved–from one primarily focusing on internal communication, to its current role that very much includes content for external visitors. That content included blog entries about such general policy topics as mentoring, lines of institutional authority and scientific productivity that reflect my personal opinions on issues that are perhaps as relevant for Krasnow scientific staff as they are for the science community writ large.

But they are very much personal opinions and do not reflect the official position of my University. Even with that caveat, however, I’m always aware of the potential for the blog to give the inaccurate perception of official university positions, and hence I’ve tried very carefully to avoid partisan political content.

Towards the end of the year, the blog served as an vehicle for communicating my ideas about what the next five years at Krasnow should look like. Those blog entries, taken together serve as my current vision, for my second term as Krasnow Director–which begins July 1 of 2007.

Finally, one housekeeping reminder: to search this blog, use the query entry form at the upper left corner of this page.

Jim