One of my projects for the next year is to have lunch, individually or in very small groups, with all Krasnow staff members and PI’s. Some of these will be brownbags in my office, some of them will be a bit nicer–Connaught’s Place comes to mind–but the goal is to get feedback from each and every one of you on how the Institute is doing, and even more importantly, what we can do better.

If you’re a PI, you’ll probably have a very broad perspective. If you’re in a classified position or are possibly a student or postdoc, that perspective may be more narrow–I’m interested in all of them.

Jim

I would like to announce that in the interest of keeping subject matter coherent, we have created a new blog: Neuro-architecting at Krasnow. A spin-off of the “krasnow director’s column”, this blog will be used exclusively to document insights on the krasnow expansion.

I will notify you of new posts to the neuro-architecting blog by announcing them here on the director’s column.

Access the blog, and read today’s post at: http://krasnowconstruction.blogspot.com/

I know that there has, and continues to be, a lot of concern about the affect of installing an MRI in the current Krasnow building. As far as I can see, the principle concern is how on-going experiments and research will be affected, both by the installation, but more importantly as a result of MRI operations going forward.

Our alternative, was purchasing a $700K temporary housing facility (a.k.a. trailer), building a pad for the trailer and then putting the magnet in the trailer until the new Krasnow building is completed sometime around Fall of 2007. Here are the reasons that led me to consider other alternatives:

1) The trailer investment would basically be lost. This type of facility would not have a high resale value relative to what the University would have spent on it, even if we were successful in non-destructively removing the magnet from the trailer when the new building was ready.

2) The trailer would be a less than optimal environment for the high-performance data collection that we expect form cognitive neuroscience research, as opposed say…to clinical imaging.

3) The trailer would, in the way these things typically play out, probably become a permanent fixture even after the new building became available and would be an eyesore. It would detract from the overall aesthetic quality of the Institute.

4) Most importantly, the difference between retrofitting the current building and purchasing the trailer is large. These additional non-recoverable costs would have had to have been recovered in direct charges to users down the road. That seemed unpalatable.

So, we proceeded to chose, among several alternatives, installing the unit in space currently utilized by the Institute Administration and the Center for Neuroeconomics (after positive reactions from that Center Director).

Installation in this existing space would have the following advantages:

1) We think it’s going to be a lot cheaper–at worst, at least we don’t lose our investment.

2) It’ll potentially add flexibility to space allocations in the new building

3) It’ll be adjacent to the Center for Neuroeconomics–which clearly will benefit that group.

With regards to the installation:

It is most likely that Siemens will be handling the entire installation as a “turn-key” operation. That means, that they will use their extant expertise to *do* what they have to do, in order to deliver appropriate shielding and performance–this means that they don’t get paid, if the finished installation leaks sound, RF, magnetic field etc. in such a way as to disrupt adversely experiments.

Finally….the acquisition of this technology is both good for Krasnow and good for the University. I hope that we all can agree on that.

Jim

So, without commenting on the possibility of a future Mason medical school and teaching hospital, I think there is a clear need at Krasnow for accessibility to clinical materials and databases in research. Currently the mechanisms aren’t there. Or to put it more generously, they are evolving slowly. From my standpoint, it should be a priority of the Institute to gain access to, and the ability to run, clinical trials–and beyond that–we need to figure out ways to share in ownership of the data from those trials, and then to re-use that data in new basic research.

Secondly…it seems to me that we need a way to hire clinical faculty (as distinct from instructional faculty) and then allow them to see patients, as a way of supporting their salaries. Currently Mason only has the instructional- and research-faculty models. We need to now add to that, at least at Krasnow, so that clinical scientists working on cognition, can be part of the community, while not having to give up their clinical sources of income.

Obviously any time an institute acquires new instrumentation it presents an opportunity–both for the existing faculty (they get to use the technology to test new hypotheses) and for the recruiting of new faculty (come to an institute where you can use Widget Y to conduct your research).

For me, ultimately, the goal is to bring the finest faculty to Krasnow (and with them the finest trainees, postdocs and graduate students). Instrumentation can’t write papers that get into SCIENCE or Nature….yet. But it’s also clear that instrumentation can be a key part of the overall package that induces someone great to come to a place. The strategy then, needs to be to be clever about leveraging instrumentation into the faculty offer package.

As Krasnow expands, as we acquire new technologies (above and beyond the current MRI acquisition), the trick will be to use the instrumentation as a “honey pot”.

My thanks to one of the Krasnow PI’s for the above idea: it’s spot on.

“We shape our dwellings, and afterwards our dwellings shape us.”
– Winston Churchill as cited on ANFA’s video “The Difference 100 years makes”

Thank you Jim Olds and Jennifer Sturgis for your kind introductions. I am delighted to have the opportunity to be involved in this collaborative project, especially here at the Krasnow Institute.

The first phase of the “neuro-architecting” process will be the information gathering phase (Discovery Phase) in which I will be conducting faculty and staff interviews in order to better understand how you live/work/interact in your personal and communal habitats. I expect to have the interview tools prepared by the end of next week, and would like to invite you to schedule an interview beginning the week of July 4 (after the holiday) through the end of July. Each interview should take 30 minutes to 1 hour – as your schedule permits. I can be contacted by email: meredith@anfarch.org, or by phone: 202.478.2500 x 52.

As we embark on this discovery, I encourage you to imagine, play, and defer judgment … no idea is a dumb idea.

I look forward to meeting each of you in person – or electronically in the case of those traveling this summer. Please feel free to post or email comments at any time.

If you’ve read your email, you know now that Meredith Banasiak, will be doing an internship at Krasnow for the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture this summer. With a background in both neuroscience and architecture, Meredith is doing something on the bleeding edge: she’s going to be meeting with all of us (Krasnow staff) this summer and synthesizing our collective input along with her own knowledge in both fields, so that design-build team gets the best possible advice/input on how to do the Krasnow Expansion right. This is something along the lines of what the Society for Neuroscience is doing for its own move into a brand new space….and it’s an example of how, in the future, knowledge of neuroscience, may inform the practice of architecture.

Meredith will be publishing her findings over the summer right here–on this blog. So stay tuned and enjoy the very special treatment that Krasnow is getting from some of this country’s finest architectural and neuroscience leaders.

Some of you may know that the Society for Neuroscience and the American Institute of Architects have a joint collaborative project which is called The Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (www. ANFArch.org). It is based in La Jolla and is closely tied with our two sister institutes, NSI and Salk. Over the last two years, I have become increasingly involved in this collaborative venture–which loosely–is interested in the notion of using knowledge gleaned from neuroscience research to improve architectural practice. This summer we’ll be attending a workshop at the National Academy of Science’s summer digs in Woods Hole to look at the whole idea of using neuroscience to design better hospitals and health care facilities–something I know our Advisory Board members are interested in.

This summer we’re going to all get a closer look at this new Institute because they are going to be involved in the Krasnow Expansion Project. More on that tomorrow….

Paul Schopf of SCS took me out for a test drive in his new navy blue porche boxter over lunch. And we talked about high performance computing at Mason. One thought we both had is how, by pursuing HPC independently (many units doing their own thing), we loose the PR aspects of what we could have, if we combined our purchasing power across units. In otherwords, imagine the joy of telling some job candidate about the X terraflops of computing power that will be available, if s(he) comes to Krasnow.

But then there’s the notion of HPC becoming comoditized. Are we just going to start thinking about computational power as something we get out of a jack?

So for those of you who use Macs, I finally got around to upgrading my G5 system to Tiger (OS X 4.1) yesterday. It seems to work pretty well–although the version off the DVD (4.0) was unstable–I needed to upgrade off the net right away. The two major new features: Spotlight (finds anything on your hard-disk) and Dashboard (a bunch of widgets that show up in a sort of Mac Expose way) are pretty cool–we’ll see how useful they are.

Why am I a mac person? Largely because I don’t like dealing with PC viruses and also because I know how to use unix pretty well (the underlying command-line OS). Would I still use Mac w.out the MS Office suite? Probably not. Open Office is getting better and better, but there’s still to much of a hassle factor.