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

Of course I’m talking about the biotech economic engines in the Bay Area and Boston respectively. These regions have seen a powerful synergy develop between research universities and the various components of the biotech business ranging from genomics to informatics. In each of these areas, the tech industry has also played a key role in economic development.

Other regions have attempted to create similar sandboxes (Silicon Shire in the UK and La Jolla come to mind) and have seen some real success, however the original two regions remain the most salient.

What is interesting about the National Capitol Region in this respect is the following: a unique combination of federal (NIH and NSF), private (Howard Hughes’ Janelia Farm, Inova Health Systems, Howard University, Medstar) and large public Carnegie Research I educational institutions (Mason and University of Maryland College Park) intersecting with a burgeoning tech sector that is increasingly interested in biotech.

I believe that any attempt to blindly emulate Silicon Valley or the Route 128 corridor would have great difficulty succeeding–anywhere. However, I do think the notion of building an economic engine based on an intersection of biosciences (writ very large) and tech, nourished by federal and private R&D expenditures could be exactly what is needed to create a new version of these extraordinary economic success stories.

Jim

The MRI is being ramped up this afternoon. If all goes well we should have a 3T field strength with proper homogeneity later today. Secondly, the pile driving is now complete on the Krasnow Expansion Project. Next stage will be the foundation work.

To my mind, Memorial Day, marks the begining of the summer, even if it’s a tad early as far as the calendar is concerned. At an Institute like Krasnow, this is generally a time when the pace of activities are somewhat reduced, as many of our scientists are on travel. My own summer science travel will involve a trip to Santa Fe (home of our sister institute), a great apes research center in Iowa and two weeks in Woods Hole at the Marine Biological Laboratory.

This summer is slightly unusual for the Institute in that the construction will continue a pace. We’ll make a renewed effort to summarize where we are in terms of the Expansion laboratories, so that folks here at least will have some idea of where we are in the overall project.

Jim

So here are two pictures taken from my trip last week. The first picture is of the Highlands coastline facing the Atlantic. The odd shaped island is Eigg (pronounced “egg”). The second is a picture of Ian and Loreen who were without question superb and very friendly staff members on our train, The Royal Scotsman–they are offering us refreshments as we return from an outing along the western coast.

There can be little doubt that when science becomes nationalistic–that
is, when international scientific exchange declines–for what ever
reason, then the scientific enterprise writ large is damaged.

During my stay in the UK last week, it become very clear that, at the
moment, feelings about the United States are quite negative. This
sensibility seems to run both broad and deep and, should it continue,
will inevitably put at risk the extraordinarily important network of
research collaborations, student exchange and international scientific
dialog.

I can’t speak personally, but I suspect that what I saw in the UK is
present to greater or lesser degree in other nations that actively
participate in the scientific enterprise.

The question then becomes how to manage the current state of affairs
from the standpoint of science so as to minimize the damage and the
risk. The answer, to my mind, is that it becomes even more important to
nurture and protect these threads that make up the network of
international scientific exchange.

At the institutional level this can be reified by formal and informal
ties to sister centers across the world. At the level of scientific
publication, it can mean actively recruiting manuscripts from
international authors. From the standpoint of research support, it means
that we should be redoubling our efforts to support initiatives such as
the the Human Frontier Science Program (www.hfsp.org) or the NIH Fogarty
Center (www.fic.nih.gov) which exist to support international
collaborative science. Finally, on the individual level, it implies
treasuring our scientific relationships that extend beyond national
boundaries. In the end, it may be those individual relationships that
sustain the enterprise as a whole.

Jim

I had a delightful trip to the Highlands of Scotland this past week. I’ll post some pictures later. Now it’s back to serious blogging. As I prepare to begin my second five year term as Krasnow Director next July, this blog will be playing a critical role in developing a substantive agenda for the growth of the Institute.

Jim

Well, another academic year is coming to a close this weekend with George Mason’s commencement exercises. This Saturday, 6803 students will be receiving degrees at Mason’s Patriot Center. The commencement speaker will be Scott Cowen, President of Tulane University.

For Krasnow, this has been a very active year: both in construction, the acquisition of our 3T MRI and changes among our faculty. I am really looking forward to welcoming Rob Axtell, Nathalia Peixoto and Jim Thompson as new principal investigators at the Institute with the commencement of the Fall term. And over the summer, I’ll be asking each of them to serve as guest bloggers at some point so as to describe their research foci. And we will have hired an MR Technician in the next couple of weeks–this individual will play the key role in making things work smoothly at our brain imaging center. I’d also like to welcome our new receptionist, Joey Carls.

Outside my office window today, the earthmoving equipment is filling the air with the sounds of diesel engines–we’re now hard at work on creating the extra 12,500 square feet of lab space that will enable Krasnow to continue its rapid expansion over the next five year period.

Tomorrow I leave for about a week in Scotland. We’ll give the blog a rest over that period and pick up where we left off when I return.

Jim

This time I link to our colleagues from Charlottesville for their excellent advice.

I have a couple of my own rules of thumb:

Be aware of the differential advantages of choosing someone who is quite junior (perhaps an assistant professor) vis a vis a more senior mentor who leads a large group.

The more junior mentor will have potentially much more time for the trainee, which is really extremely important for learning the basic skills of science, from experimental design through data analysis. However, because of their own usually untenured status, they may turn out to be extremely aggressive about first authorship. Thus there is potentially a situational competitiveness between trainee and mentor–a big negative.

The more senior mentor (aka a lab chief) will have much less time. She or he will tend to run the lab in a more delegated fashion and perhaps lab meetings will be the only opportunity for face-to-face contact with the boss. In these situations, the lucky trainee will often connect with some senior post-doc in the lab who will de facto fulfill the “hands on” role of the more junior mentor described above. The good thing about these situations is that a more senior lab chief often has a much more generous attitude towards authorships and even promoting the independence of the trainee. Remember, this type of mentor already has attained significant success in their career and so there is little or no incentive to compete with the trainee for credit.

One other characteristic of the more senior mentor: they probably have the ability to pick up the phone and secure the trainee a well-placed next job. This of course is very important.

Jim