The Board of Trustees met last week to discuss the Top-Tier Science Initiative program and illuminated their goals for the university as a research institution.
The Board of Trustees met from March 23 through March 25, for its regular monthly meeting. Among the topics discussed, the Board expanded its discussion of the Science Initiative (SI) and the impacts it is expected to have on campus.
“There has been an ongoing push on the part of Dr. Brown [Deputy Director of SI] and Mark Lyford [Director of SI] and others, paying attention to what the direction of the Science Initiative was,” William Mai said. “When you get these spaces assigned to you, they’re not in perpetuity.”
“You’ve got to earn it and you’ve got to keep earning it.”
Mai iterated the importance for all UW lab spaces to be used properly throughout campus, not just within the new facility.
“This does open up that broader discussion about ensuring that all of our lab spaces are properly utilized,” Mai said. “You start with that priority of the SI.”
UW has several initiatives geared towards returning the university to R-1 status, including the school of computing and SI.
“President Seidel has formed a group that includes individuals who’ve had a long involvement with the Science Initiative and the Engineering Initiative,” Greg Brown, Ph. D., said. “We are talking about ‘How can these initiatives, including the Trustees Education Initiative work more closely together to drive UW to R-1 status?’”
Brown emphasized the importance of ensuring that not only should the new Science Initiative continuously challenge researchers to continually push their respective fields, but also to begin to change the culture of research at UW.
“One of the things we sold the Science Initiative Building on was open shared research bases by faculty,” Brown said. “That’s where research is going and has gone at universities. Large interdisciplinary groups working on big projects that will share space.”
“We’re starting to change the culture at UW from ‘One lab, one PI’ [principal investigator], the university tradition that started in the 1900s,” Brown said. “We’ve got to change that model, in my view, to become more modern.”
President Ed Seidel shared his sentiments on the Science Initiative and what he hopes it will do for the university as a research institute.
“It’s really exciting, what’s happening here,” Seidel said.
“The idea of having the SI Building as an interdisciplinary institute that will bring together the sciences from across the whole campus, from physics and from computer science and from social sciences, to all come together to address complex challenges, that’s the direction we’re moving in.”
