Congrats to Claudio Cioffi and his Center for Social Complexity

Having just won a hard-fought competition for a coveted MURI (Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative) award from the Department of Defense.

Quoting from DOD:


MURI is a program designed to address large multidisciplinary topic areas representing exceptional opportunities for future DoD applications and technology options. The awards will provide long-term support for research, graduate students and laboratory instrumentation development that supports specific science and engineering research themes vital to national defense.


Administrators chained to desks in Akron

I hope loyal readers know I find this Dean’s actions reprehensible. He fired a department chair for working from home.

Money quote:

Howard M. Ducharme Jr. was the chairman of the philosophy department at Akron for the last 11 years. He said he had never heard of an attendance policy for department chairmen until Ronald F. Levant, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the university, called him at home one day last month at 4:30 p.m. and asked him why he wasn’t at his desk.

Mr. Ducharme—who said that particular day began with a 6:30 a.m. breakfast meeting—told the dean he was working from home. He met with the dean a day later and was told, he said, that “being on leave is a military concept, and when one is away from their duty station without permission, they are AWOL.”

AWOL? I think that’s a bit much.

I do see the need to be able to contact chairs by cell phone or email when the need is urgent.

Jim

Social neuroscience

Many loyal readers know that I’m an avid fan of the Saturday Financial Times–in many ways superior to the Old Gray Lady’s (NY Times) Sunday edition–just my opinion. 

Here’s a really interesting article about Ohio State University’s John Cacioppo and his research on the neurobiology of loneliness. My sister, a psychiatrist, has written about the subject in her book (written with her husband, also a psychiatrist) Overcoming Loneliness in Everyday Life. But Cacioppo’s approach is different–his research appears to reveal a gene network that is triggered by loneliness with potentially lethal affects. And perhaps more importantly the notion of a new subfield: social neuroscience.
Jim

Allen Institute to go after Human Neocortex now

Money quote from MSNBC:

The Allen Institute already has a head start on the human brain, thanks to its studies of gene expression in the human cortex. Today marks the official beginning of a four-year campaign to characterize gene activity in the entire human brain.

Jones said the institute spent about $41 million to create the mouse brain atlas, and about half of that work can be leveraged for the new project. However, he estimated that completing the human brain map would require $55 million more, spread over four years.

“The human brain is 2,000 times as large as the mouse brain,” he observed. “The first thing that you’re faced with, right out of the gate, is that it’s 2,000 times as big.”

Medical Education Reinvented

Here’s an interesting look at some of the big changes that are taking place in medical education as the YouTube generation heads towards the clinic and hospital bed.

One of the most exciting things about the current crop of the medical schools is that they’re coming on-line at the same time as the entire medical curriculum is undergoing a reinvention. We’ve called this change “Flexner II” elsewhere in this blog.

Jim

HHMI to the rescue: new PI grants program

Jack Dixon, now at HHMI, is heading up a new program to help newly minted assistant professors in the biomedical research areas.

Here’s the quote:

The Early Career Scientist Program will pay salaries and provide research money for people who have held tenure-track positions for only two to six years, with the goal of supporting them through the early period before they are likely to get a research grant from the National Institutes of Health.

Jim

Demographics shift to affect college admissions

Tomorrow’s NY Times suggests that higher education may be in for a big shift: less applicants.

Here’s the money quote:

Projections show that by next year or the year after, the annual number of high school graduates in the United States will peak at about 2.9 million after a 15-year climb. The number is then expected to decline until about 2015. Most universities expect this to translate into fewer applications and less selectivity, with most students likely finding it easier to get into college.

Mountain weather

Arrived in the mountains this morning. DC was rainy when we left, the mountain was actually warmer and sunny. But less than an hour later, it was white out conditions as a front blew through, now it’s clear again. Can’t really be bored by the weather on the Blue Ridge.

Yesterday at the Institute for Advanced Study we had a very interesting workshop considering biomimetics as a principle for thinking about designing applications and more importantly social behavior (think ant colonies). It was wonderful to see old friends and new friends sharing their latest ideas. Biology is a tremendous treasure trove of clues to the nature of the Universe. My friend and colleague Harold Morowitz believes that it may provide the most important clues.
So much for physics, except for the fact that all of biology is in fact physics operating at an incredibly complex level.
Jim

The Institute Advisory Board

Tomorrow the Institute’s Advisory Board will gather for its regular Spring meeting. These individuals play a crucial role in providing me with strategic advice. Even more importantly the board members have, through their gifts, made much of the scientific discovery at Krasnow possible.

And scientific discovery is ultimately the purpose of the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study. The other day I was tasked with creating a new Institute mission statement for the upcoming re- accreditation process whereby George Mason is reaffirmed as a university. That’s worth thinking very carefully about–because behind the words, there has to be something measurable. To my mind, this measurable thing has to be scientific discovery. That is the creation of new knowledge about the natural world within the context of “mind” research.
Tomorrow I’ll ask the Advisory Board to join me in the work of creating this new mission statement: one that places discovery at the central point of our work.
Jim