Today, the exterior opening to the MRI suite is being created. This
will allow both access to the work area during the construction phase
and delivery of the Magnet when it arrives in early May. At the same
time, the temporary barrier wall for the MRI construction is now in
place.

Outside the building, the Whiting Turner construction zone is now
fenced off in preparation for ground clearing work.

Both construction teams are in the process of making the appropriate
electrical connections to their work sites.

Jim

Temporary barrier walls are going in today and tomorrow. The concrete demolition is going to occur on the evening of March 1. Should be over by morning. They will be pouring the concrete for about three hours on the 3rd.

Delivery date on the Magnet is scheduled for May 8.

Jim

Integrating Krasnow as a research institute within Virginia’s largest
Carnegie Research I University has never been a simple proposition
although, it’s become more transparent since the Institute was merged
into the University in April of 2002. Basically the Krasnow Institute
for Advanced Study is a research unit (somewhat akin to an academic
unit) under the Provost of the University. The distinction between a
research unit and academic unit is blurred on a de facto basis,
because there are academic programs with faculty members who are
housed at Krasnow, and there are classes, brown-bag lunches and
seminars at the Institute, which are in actuality sponsored by
academic programs. The two most important of these are the doctoral
program in neuroscience and the doctoral program in social complexity.

However, as a research unit of the University, the main function at
Krasnow is basic research and the ultimate deliverable is scientific
discovery (with important metrics for this in peer-reviewed
publications, sponsored research awards and the like). Within this
model, the Institute serves both as a “jewel-in-the crown” and also
as an important catalyst for research across the University as a
whole. Our Centers are important examples of this catalyst function:
Neural Dynamics facilitates the research of faculty in Math, Physics,
and Psychology (to name a few), while Neuro-economics facilitates the
research of Law and Economics faculty members. Our Adaptive Systems
Laboratory facilitates the research of faculty members within the
Volgenau School of Information Technology and Engineering.

Along the same lines, our Imaging Core, will serve as shared-
instrumentation for the entire cognitive neuroscience community of
the University (and frankly the National Capital Area as well) but
will also facilitate the research of new faculty to be hired in areas
such as bioengineering.

Over the next five years, these bridges will be broadened, extended
and diversified. The goal is to have the Institute serve the
University both as a research resource (for other academic units) and
as an engine of scientific discovery in the area of cognitive
research while at the same time, through technology transfer serving
as the nucleus of an effort to make the University, an economic
engine of the region.

One of the characteristics of any dynamic and growing young university is change. This is especially manifest at George Mason. A challenge for any research organization, but particularly one in science, is change management. How do we build from our successes knowing full well that our institutional environment will be changing rapidly? Along the same lines, how do we plan for a successful future when our successes imply fundamental changes for our own institute?

A place to start this blog entry is with the notion of “change management”. Wikipedia defines this term in the following way:

“Change management is the process of developing a planned approach to change in an organization. Typically the objective is to maximize the collective efforts of all people involved in the change and minimize the risk of failure of implementing the change. The discipline of change management deals primarily with the human aspect of change, and is therefore related to pure and industrial psychology.”

Note the connection to psychology and hence the implied thread to cognitive science–one our institutional foci. The notion is to engage those affected by change into preparation and planning, so that change becomes a positive, rather than a negative.

With regards to change that comes as a result of our university’s rapid growth, clearly this implies a constant dialog (a give and take) between the stakeholders outside the Institute and those of us on the inside, most certainly involving myself, but also the staff and the PI’s. If we can play a role in planning for change then we can have a good chance of having the change work in our favor.

I think the same goes for change that comes as a result of the Institute’s own dynamics (as an example our expansion project). Here also, if a dialog can be established, then those affected by the proposed changes can constructively “channel the course” of that change so that it results in good things rather than bad. This blog is in fact a result of my desire to establish a virtual open door to the director’s office, so that change is never dropped upon our folks out of the blue, but rather evolves –in real time– on the blog and in the day to day planning for the Institute’s future.

What about strategic planning? Here also is an exercise in change management–although in this case in a more structured way aimed at charting the desired course for future institutional dynamics. As part of the University’s strategic planning exercise last year, our own strategic plan for the Institute in 2010 was crafted. The results can be seen here. Strategic planning is by its very nature, obsolete by the time the plan is public–that’s certainly true of ours. Yet the exercise is extremely useful because it helps us imagine a future that is in fact different from the current state of affairs.

Ultimately change management is about maximizing the opportunities that come our way.

In this blog entry, I’ll be writing about the most urgent metric for success at any institute: scientific discovery. Certainly if it were possible to create such outcomes with any degree of predictability then our more senior sister institutes would be vastly more successful. In fact, there is a large consensus (at least among US scientific administrators) that the major discoveries when they come, are the product of at least as much serendipity as anything else.

Nevertheless, it’s my belief that there are certain strategies that one can take (the best analogy would be to growing a garden) that can maximize the probabilities for success in this most important area.

First: laying out the garden bed. As with the necessities for good soil and water drainage, an Institute like Krasnow needs a fine infrastructure that includes the tools for research (instrumentation and the like) along with appropriate housing for scientific staff and breakout space for collaborative discussions and seminars. It helps to be surrounded by a beautiful environment (other examples are Woods Hole and the Santa Fe Institute).

Second: select good seed. As with everything, you get what you pay for. Here the notion is to select the absolutely best scientists (based on their track records and also their ideas) and then provide them with the salary, resources and time to focus on their science. This always entails both risk and opportunity. One of the Nobel Laureates involved early on in Krasnow’s founding only received his tenure after his Prize.

Third: Cultivate, fertilize and water. Discovery depends on experimentation which is not always predictable. There are “dry spells”. More resources must be supplied and scientists must be provided with the crucial time to think and digest their data. When bridge-funding is required, it must be, in general, provided.

Fourth: Sometimes hybridization can lead to better results. It’s my opinion that the lowest hanging scientific fruit (i.e. the zero-th order questions) are inherently trans-disciplinary in nature. To get at these opportunities for truly paradigm changing discoveries, investigators from different disciplines must collaborate and discuss. They must come together across the jargon-divides of their various fields.

Fifth: always be ready to re-seed. Sometimes things don’t work out. It’s crucial not to let those failures get in the way of trying again. But it’s also crucial to learn from one’s mistakes.

Any discussion of where we are headed must inevitably begin with a discussion of from where we have come. When I came on board as Krasnow Director in July of 1998, the amount of sponsored research at the Institute was less than $100,000. Freshly moved into our brand new facility there were sixteen people on staff (including all PI’s, postdocs and students). An early version of our website can be found here with the announcement of one our our first grants–a private award from the Whitaker Foundation. In the space of the following eight years, we have grown: the Institute has brought in over $16M in sponsored research, there are now 60 staff members and the Institute is now the de facto locus of two doctoral Ph.D. programs and ten research centers, cores or laboratories. The scientific alumni of the Institute are now in senior scientific positions around the world and our scientific success has been covered in the national and international media and at the highest levels of government.
Along the way, the constant was our seminar series which had begun in 1994. Here is the archived calendar of the seminar series from that first year. Over the next twelve years the Krasnow seminar series brought an always interesting set of talks to Fairfax on topics ranging from American Sign Language from the standpoint of cognitive neuroscience to the representation of odors in the rodent olfactory bulb. The current calendar can be found here.
Looking back, I would say that there were two major punctuation markers in the history of the Institute up to the current point. The first occurred with the transition of directors and the move in to the current facility over the 1997-1998 year. The second occurred in 2002, when the Institute successfully merged into George Mason University. We now stand at the threshold of the third of these markers–the construction of Krasnow Phase II and the opening of our Brain Imaging Center. In the next blog entry I will continue this discussion, but now focusing exclusively on the future.

Over the next several blog entries, I’ll be addressing the question of the future–that is the next five years at the Institute. The overarching questions that I hope to address are 1) how do we facilitate truly significant scientific discoveries at the Institute, 2) how do we build on our current success while managing change and 3) how do we relate to the rapidly emerging research enterprise at George Mason.

By way of introduction to these topics, the context must continue to be: excellence in research aimed at understanding the function (under both normal and pathological conditions) of the working human brain, while at the same time focusing on understanding both the origin of, and reverse engineering, its architecture and physiology.

These are among the most difficult scientific questions out there. The goal is for the Institute to make substantive contributions to this clearly trans-disciplinary field of inquiry. The challenge remains, as always, that scientific success is never assured, nor even predictable in its course. So we must create the optimal conditions for such fundamental discovery, rather than micromanaging the research programs of our scientific faculty.

Jim

So I’ve covered a lot of the Krasnow waterfront in this blog. To search
the index use the search tool in the upper-left corner. That’ll bring up
a listing of where that term was used in the blog. I tried it with the
term “Krasnow”. It worked pretty well.

Jim

This just in from our Design Build Contractor:
————————————————————————–

Mike,

Whiting-Turner is very excited to mobilize to the site in anticipation
of starting construction in the next few weeks. Below is a list of
activities that will be happening starting Tuesday February 14 and
continuing for the next two weeks:

1) Temporary site security fence delivered and installed
2) Construction dumpster delivered and placed
3) Construction gate installed
4) WT trailers will be delivered and installed
5) Temporary power, data, phones installed to trailer
6) Temporary toilet facilities placed on site
7) Tree selection and identification for future clearing activities

These activities will require that a few of the staff, faculty and
students of Krasnow to alter their current parking and walking habits.
There will not be any parking or access to the rear of the Krasnow
Institute unless in an emergency.

Jim Jaco will be on site Monday to work on laying out the specific areas
and identifying site fence boundaries. WT will work with Siemens to
coordinate with their site logistics.

Thanks,

Scott McEntee
Project Manager

I had a very interesting early morning breakfast at the Pentagon City Ritz this morning with two colleagues and a guest. The conversation started out with the guest asking some very pointed questions about neuroscience but quickly expanded into several interesting and intersecting threads:

One thread had to do with the link between deception (as in deceiving others), self-deception and memory (in all of its various kinds, but mainly focusing on episodic).

There was another thread that was centered on the notion of intracellular communication (signal transduction in the language of biologists) as a metaphor for network communication principles.

And the third thread dealt with the inherent contradiction of having collaborations be fruitful when elements of the data are classified (i.e. secret). By the way, this is not only true in the milieu of DOD, it’s also true in many areas of science, and further any area where intellectual property is at stake.

It seems to me that all of these threads should be elements of what we look at here at Krasnow: the first clearly in the field of cognitive neuroscience, the second partly in molecular cell biology, but also tied up with adaptive systems and the third in the domain of social complexity.

Jim