I’m at a meeting sponsored by Sandia National Labs here at the famous La Fonda hotel in Santa Fe. Last night I had dinner with two colleagues from the Santa Fe Institute where the discussion moved broadly across disciplines from Dennet’s views on religion to Jeff Hawkins new view of how the neocortex works. At the meeting itself there was a really interesting set of talks on the new quantum dot technology, which just now seems to be maturing to where it can be of practical use in cellular neuroscience. All of this in the absolutely unique milieu of Santa Fe–another place (like Woods Hole or La Jolla) where science is the lingua franca.

Today back across the country via Chicago to Washington where the rain storm of the last two hundred years has finally ended.

Jim

I’ll be on the road for the next couple of days and probably wont be blogging (it’s possible but not enjoyable to blog from a blackberry). Here in DC we had the most rain in a 24 hour period since 1871! So it’s a small miracle to find the Institute intact and dry this morning. In the meantime, I bring your attention to a very useful article addressing one of the major risks facing high-achievers as they go on the job market.

I had the honor of participating this afternoon in a joint venture of Howard University and University of Texas El Paso–the 3rd Preparing Future Faculty (PFF)Institute here in DC on the campus of Howard. My talk was on the value of multidisciplinary research but in discussions with the students, we covered everything from mentoring to potassium channels and then on to social complexity models. Kudos to Terrolyn P. Carter who has been coordinator of the Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate and the Preparing Future Faculty Programs at Howard and to Orlando Taylor, Howard’s Vice Provost for Research and Dean of the graduate school there.

To the students I met, thank you for your great feedback and I look forward to continuing the dialog virtually.

Jim

The Krasnow Institute has had a long-term and quite intellectually deep relationship with the Santa Fe Institute. In fact, it would be accurate to say that SFI played a key role in the founding of Krasnow since the symposium, “The Mind, The Brain, and Complex Adaptive Systems”, sponsored by Santa Fe and George Mason University in May of 1993 directly led to the current Krasnow Institute scientific program (click on the link above). Currently there are direct links between the two institutes at the board and scientific advisory board levels: we are indeed sister institutes.

Krasnow also has less formal ties to other institutes (of similar scientific scope). In many cases, these links are simply research collaborations, or reified as individual scientists who have spent time at both places.

In the future, we’ll be moving quite significantly to increase our international institutional ties and, most importantly, will be offering opportunities for scholars seeking to use their sabbatical time in extended visits to Krasnow. This fits very much with one of the original ideas for the Institute: to populate it almost exclusively with visiting scholars–an idea that was ultimately rejected, but also one with many good attributes for promoting scientific discovery.

Jim

I spent three years in the mid-90’s working as the Executive Director
of a scientific society. It was an interesting detour in my career–I
learned about everything from event planning to government affairs–by
the seat of my pants, and definitely without a license. Fortunately I
was lucky enough to have some excellent mentors–and particularly for
those trips to Capitol Hill, the friendship of two former
congressional staff members who were nice enough to tutor me in what
to say to a member of congress (and more importantly what not to say).

One of the most interesting aspects of my job was actually
heading up a 501(c)3 nonprofit and having to learn to get along with a
governance board (in scientific societies termed “council” but acting
as a board of directors). For nonprofits, there are several models for
governance–I suppose it was lucky, given my relative inexperience,
that our model was strong board-weak CEO. I was to learn however that
in practice a model with greater equality between the CEO and the
board is typically best for the organization.

That scientific society was also where I cut my teeth on building a
web site, working with databases and developing the interpersonal
skills that I find myself using, even as an academic administrator
here at George Mason.

Most importantly, those years gave me the experience which most active
faculty scientists never have: learning how difficult and complex the
work of crafting science policy can be–and how it’s rarely the folks
in the limelight who have done the most challenging of the work.

Jim

The foundation slab for the new Krasnow expansion is being laid down as of today. Please excuse the concrete trucks!

Jim

We’ve had a great seminar series at Krasnow for a number of years now. We’re always looking for new suggestions on good speakers–generally we’re looking for researchers who are doing work in the general research domain of the Institute. I’d like to throw open this blog for suggestions for the upcoming Fall series. If you use the blog to nominate someone (or yourself), please include appropriate links (to homepages for example) and please let us know why you think your suggestion would be interesting to the Krasnow audience.

Jim

A very interesting report in Nature suggesting that the Hodgkin Huxley view of action potential generation may be qualitatively incorrect. The evidence in the article based on in vivo and in vitro measurements of the the dynamics of action potential initiation. Bottom line: sodium channels may be acting cooperatively with one another. What would be the mechanism?

Jim

I know of a sitting provost who has published a multitude of books in his field and continues to do so, at a blistering pace. I know of an NIH director, who, during his entire successful tenure, maintained a very active lab and research group. I know of a medical school department chair, who is as immersed in signal transduction data (from his own laboratory) as I was as a young post doc.

Successful science administrators are very often active in their research groups, if not the actual lab bench. Why is that? The skills of science administration, at first analysis, while requiring perhaps some understanding of science (and the relevant fields for the job) do not seem to overlap with those of a working scientist.

However, I suspect that maintaining an active research program enhances one’s credibility with the scientists who are being managed. I also think that being active in research may facilitate the “walking around” component of leadership (i.e. informal meetings outside of the director’s office) because conversations can at least start off in the enjoyable domain of science before per chance evolving into more stodgy domains such as space utilization.

About that NIH director: we may have disagreed with his decisions about our lives on campus, but we all grudgingly gave him his dues as a top notch scientist.

Jim

Yesterday we completed our first human scans–on volunteers Professors Kalbfleisch and McCabe–the joint co-chairs of Neuroimaging Core of the Krasnow Institute (click on the link). So things are now rapidly moving along.