“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.

When you have an MRI system, one of the key ingredients to getting good data is having the magnetic field be homogenous inside the bore of the magnet (where the subject’s head is). Unfortunately elements of the local environment around the magnet (large filing cabinets for example) can adversely affect this uniformity of the field and so….when we install the MRI system, we either passively or actively counteract these effects–this is called shimming the magnet. From a passive standpoint, one can attach small metal plates to the magnet in such a way as to bring things back to uniformity. One can also actively shim the magnet, using small powered coils that produce shim current–also with the goal of making the field inside the bore perfectly uniform.

So here’s the tripper upper: once you shim an MRI, it’s really important not to move big metal objects that are within some threshold distance of the magnet. From what I’ve heard this is particularly true above the magnet, but I’ve got a lot more to learn about this.

All of this has implications for space utilization at Krasnow.

Now that the grant is out of the way, I’m going to try to take time to walk around the labs and common spaces some more. This doesn’t mean that I’m planning some complicated re-allocation of space. But I do want to learn more about how we are using the space we do have–so that we can do better in the Expansion Space, and also simply so that I can see a bit more of the really exciting science that we’re currently doing.

When I take visitors on a tour, it’s a very different process than what I’m talking about above–I’m focused on the visitor. I want to focus the other direction also.

Good morning. Today is grant submission day for our Howard Hughes Medical Institute proposal to support neuroengineering doctoral training at Mason. So this is going to be a short post.

Why neuroengineering? First, because it’s a natural extension of our current strengths in our neuroscience doctoral program. Second, because it brings us closer to a natural collaborator: the School of IT&E, which has made the strategic decision to move into bioengineering. And finally, because, at Krasnow, we’re becoming ever more instrumentation and modeling oriented in the way we do our interdisciplinary research.

Regarding the 3T Magnet: some considerations that were getting very good advice on:
Vibration–making sure that others in the building don’t have their experiments jostled.
Magnetic fields–the magnetic field stays in the magnet room, and large metal objects, such as filing cabinets in the building, don’t affect the homogeneity of the magnetic field–that’s called the shim BTW.
Sound–limiting the sound produced by the gradient coils so that we can still enjoy eachothers conversations.

Consultants and Siemens are going to play a key role here.

Well cheers…and wish me luck on the grant.

We’ll see how long it takes anyone at Krasnow to discover my blog this summer. I’m not going to publicize it at first–I want to see how things go and get some content up first. But eventually I’m hoping that this content will provide a “director’s seat” window into the various projects that are going on at the Institute this summer. Specifically, I’ll be writing (pretty much daily) about:
1) The Siemens 3T MRI scanner that we’re installing
2) The Krasnow Expansion Project
3) Space re-allocation decisions related to (1) and (2)
4) The Neuroscience Academic Research Organization project

among other items.

My goal is to disseminate useful news and my own views in a way that facilitates the science here, while at the same time giving myself some informal room to ruminate and editorialize without being overly top-down in my approach.