The Atheneum at Caltech

The week before last, I had the pleasure of returning to the place I grew up, Pasadena California. This is the Caltech Atheneum, probably the nicest faculty club I know of. Staying here for a short work visit to LA was full of memories–this place was my family’s first temporary home, back in 1969 when my Dad moved from Ann Arbor to take a job here. But for a few modernizations (such as the student lounge with flat screens in the basement) it’s pretty much the same.

For those with cinematic memories, you may recognize the Atheneum from the movie, Beverly Hills Cop!

Brain Training Resesarch

From Nature via the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Last month Nature published a study that said training your brain was pretty much useless. While practicing a particular task might make you better at that task, the improvement was nontransferrable. Doing crosswords doesn’t make you smarter, it just makes you better at doing crosswords. Those sad findings were reported all over the place.

Spring semester

As we enter the latter part of the Spring Semester, the view from the windows of Krasnow’s Great Room gets greener. Only eight weeks ago, the view outside was arctic-like, with mounds of snow that looked to be permanent.

This has been an excellent year so far for our science. Most exciting has been the proliferation of large-scale grant awards that bring together many of the disparate disciplines represented at Mason’s Institute for Advanced Study.
It’s also been gratifying to open Krasnow’s new cellular imaging facility and to welcome two new functional brain imagers to our faculty.

Defining high risk/high payoff

Click on the link above for the mandate from the US Congress to NSF on funding more high risk research.

And what constitutes “high risk”?
“Research driven by ideas that have the potential to radically change our understanding of an important existing scientific or engineering concept, or leading to the creation of a new paradigm or field of science or engineering, and that is characterized by its challenge to current understanding or its pathway to new frontiers.”

Seeking isolation: social neuroscience (or the absence of it)

Sarah Maslin Nir has a fascinating piece in today’s NY Times on-line about men who seek nearly complete social isolation (think Robinson Crusoe) here. Money quote from the University of Chicago’s John Cacioppo:

In our culture, there is this mythic individualism that we cherish,” said Dr. Cacioppo, who studies the biological and cognitive effects of isolation. “That’s particularly true for men — they are supposed to be an island unto themselves. They take that myth more seriously and try to pursue it.

A visit to my Alma Mater


I had the pleasure to visit Amherst College on a delightful Spring Day last week. As you can see, in this picture of Johnson Chapel taken from Stearns Hall, the leaves aren’t yet out on the trees of the Freshman Quad. Yet the College on the Hill continues to thrive. The students that took me to lunch before my talk asked difficult questions, but they are clearly serious and give me great hope.

At the same time, western Massachusetts is having a difficult time of it. The Great Recession has not been kind. Here inside the Beltway, we sometimes miss the larger picture of what is happening across the country. Driving back to Bradley Airport, through formerly prosperous mill towns made concrete the suffering inflicted by this crisis.

Both an Institute for Advanced Study and an Academic Unit

One of the unusual aspects of the Krasnow Institute is that over the years, it has evolved into both a Institute for Advanced Study and a regular academic unit of George Mason University. One might construe the two, as mutually exclusive–how could a true Institute for Advanced Study offer programs and degrees–but from my own perspective, nothing could be further from reality. In fact, the degree programs with their graduate students and doctoral-level research, reinforce the scientific pursuits of Krasnow.

There’s another aspect to the equation though: having an academic unit embedded within an Institute for Advanced Study (as opposed to say a College or a School). The culture of an Institute for Advanced Study centers around scientists reaching across disciplines to solve fundamentally hard problems. Under such intellectually challenging circumstances, there is considerably less time for the famous academic “foul play” that Kingsley Amis‘ character, Lucky Jim, found himself embroiled in. Students thrive in this sort of milieu (Woods Hole comes to mind) precisely because they become themselves personally involved in the original research. Faculty thrive because they are rewarded for reaching across the typical disciplinary boundaries–for that is where the big payoffs in science lie.