The student population is down and so is the traffic. We’re back from the Memorial Day weekend, but the pace on campus is a bit more relaxed. At the Krasnow Institute, the work on the card-swipe system for the front doors, continues….
This week I’ll be at the NSF in Arlington for a panel review. It’s hard work, but always very interesting.
 |
| Poster Session at 2012 Krasnow Science Retreat |
Yesterday’s symposium session is now in the books. Today begins with our student poster session followed by the “reveal” on a sculpture of the hippocampal tri-synaptic circuit (several neurons, but accurate down to the spine level) that clearly qualifies as art as well as science. Stay tuned for pictures!
And….(three hours later) here is the reveal:
 |
| Giorgio Ascoli constructs a very large hippocampal circuit |
Tomorrow, Krasnow Institute faculty, postdocs and graduate students come together for our annual two day science retreat. We come from disparate fields ranging from theoretical physics to computational social science. We have wet lab experimentalists, in silico modelers, brain imagers and behavioral economists–among many others. Our students are pursuing PhD’s in neuroscience, bioscience, computational social science and psychology.
Tomorrow, we “walk the walk” of transdisciplinarity.
It’s very difficult to get into the technical details of disciplines that are different from our own, but it’s surely implicit in what advanced studies are all about. The potential payoffs for the difficult work are immense because–I believe– the big paradigm breaking discoveries, lie at the boundaries of disciplines.
I’ll be live-tweeting the retreat tomorrow with the hashtag #krasnowscience and as will, I imagine, some of our other social networking scientists and trainees. Hope you’ll follow us on twitter.
MOOC of course stands for massively open on-line classes. Elite institutions like MIT and the University of Michigan are throwing some serious bucks that way and it’s time to speculate about their end-game. Read Jeff Selingo’s take on it here.
 |
| Mason Deans and Provost 2012 |
This is commencement week at George Mason and marks the end of another academic year at once of the most dynamic higher education institutions in America. I continue to be amazed at the growth of this place. With the Washington DC area topping many of the human development metrics, it’s easy to imagine what we might look like in a decade or two and be filled with optimism.
Here at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, we’ll be celebrating the minting of new PhD’s, our first short-course collaboration with the Santa Fe Institute and a incredibly intense scientific year. Our final Institute seminar brought Nobel Laureate, Bert Sakmann to campus. Our PI’s work on areas ranging from molecular neuroscience to complex simulations of labor markets, all with the common themes of complexity and cognition (writ large).
Next week, we come back and head into our annual science retreat where we walk the walk of transdisciplinary scholarship. I’m really looking forward to it.
Finally, there’s the professional satisfaction of seeing some of my fine neuroscience undergraduate students stand up and be awarded their bachelors degree this Saturday. Priceless.
Not really a season, but actually the several weeks long crush before the actual panel review here at NSF Headquarters in Arlington. Extraordinarily intense because so much is on the line.
This year, for the second time running, I’m using a pdf annotation app on the iPad to keep things moving along. Saves a lot of trees.
the other day on my way out to Sandia National Labs was this plane:
Boeing’s new 787 dreamliner, this in corporate livery, no doubt the performance art equivalent of the “issue adverts” we always hear on the local news station–aimed squarely at Congress. It’s good to see the long delayed new jet flying–it’s currently in revenue service in Japan and will come to the States by and by–I believe the US launch customer is United.
Discoverers and Discoveries 