When Edward Van Keuren looks out his Reiss Science Building office window, his gaze falls on the future home of Georgetown’s new science building. Granted, all the physics department chair sees right now is dirt.
But the site represents a lot to the university as a major step in Georgetown’s revolutionizing its basic science programs and enhancing its research and academic capabilities.
The practice of science is changing rapidly and Georgetown is working to respond by renewing its academic offerings, boosting research opportunities and drawing in more faculty to meet the needs of students. To have the most competitive programs, universities are blurring the lines when it comes to sciences. Historically, departments have always been very distinct entities, but now experts say everything from grant applications to advanced degree admissions require cooperation among science fields.
Sweeping transformations at Georgetown in both curriculum and physical space are being implemented to recognize that science is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary.
No one single narrative can ever fully encapsulate all of Georgetown’s scientific endeavors. Carried out in dozens of venues across the Main Campus and Medical Center, science pervades the university’s academic culture. But by focusing on the development of several natural sciences – biology, chemistry and physics – the picture of how Georgetown is changing its approach to scientific research, teaching and learning becomes clearer.
“Georgetown is and will always be devoted to shaping active learners, the people who don’t just know what others have discovered, but those who ask new, tough questions and have the discipline and patience and skill to pursue those questions to find good answers,” says Provost James O’Donnell. “There is no place in higher education where students can learn and practice these skills vital to their and our future so well as in the laboratories of the natural sciences.
“The challenge here is one of making sure that a core feature of what we’re best at gets better.”
Building Anew
The most obvious sign of Georgetown’s commitment to the sciences is a new, cutting-edge building slated to open in 2011. The new building, accompanied by a full renovation to Reiss Science Building, will significantly enhance Georgetown’s undergraduate science programs.
“Georgetown has grown amazingly in the last three or four decades in almost every area, [but] constraint of physical facilities has held us back in the natural sciences,” says O’Donnell. “Now is the moment for Georgetown to finish what we began a generation ago and take our strength to the next level.”
Today’s science researchers and students use energy-intensive, technologically advanced instruments such as high-power lasers, wide ranges of sophisticated microscopes and nuclear magnetic resonance machines. But the natural sciences’ home has been in Reiss, which opened in 1962 and is not equipped to handle the new face of science, professors say.
“The new building, says then-College Dean Jane McAuliffe, “will allow us to really do 21st-century science, and by that I mean science that is flexible–science that is able to follow the path of discovery even as it continues to accelerate.”
Van Keuren also is optimistic about the future home of some of Georgetown’s science programs.
“The new building will expand the space available for current researchers to some extent, relieving some of the space crunch that we have to deal with now,” Van Keuren says. “It will also enable us to concentrate on doing research in a state-of-the-art facility, with proper infrastructure for the most advanced equipment that we have.”
Space for more sophisticated equipment aside, the new building embodies the changing field of science.
Designed for interdisciplinary research, departments in the new building will no longer have lab space in separate wings or designated floors. Instead, the new labs will be fluid, encouraging scholars and students of all disciplines to interact with each other.
“Both the fun and hard part of research is coming up with ideas and being rigorous in your experimental design,” says Heidi Elmendorf, associate professor of biology and the new director of science planning for Georgetown College. “We’re building space so students can work together more in groups. The labs are being designed differently, but all with the concept that you need to give students the environment to think about their work and think in teams about their work.”
The new L-shaped building will house classrooms, faculty offices, teaching laboratories, research laboratories, and support space and lounge areas for the biology, chemistry and physics departments. Labs not dependent on controlled light or temperature conditions are banked along a row of windows, allowing for removable walls and for researchers to move between the spaces.
After all the professors, students and labs are moved to the new building, the university intends to renovate Reiss. Floor by floor, the building will be gutted and rebuilt from within. Though designs and projected construction timelines are under way, Georgetown will incorporate many of the same designs in Reiss, such as open learning spaces, that the new building will have.
Blending the Sciences
The building is one piece of the puzzle in delivering a world-class science education to students and producing top-flight research. Professors say the university community also must fully embrace the new interdisciplinary nature of modern science. From the most basic classroom levels to complex research projects, science is no longer practiced as isolated specialties, and quantitative approaches are important to all the sciences.
Paul Roepe, a chemistry professor, is co-director of the university’s relatively new Center for Infectious Disease. He’s also a professor in the department of biochemistry and molecular and cellular biology at the Medical Center. Tackling infectious diseases is a good example of an area that requires a multidisciplinary approach.
The other co-directors of the center are Steven Singer, a biology professor from Main Campus, and Rich Calderone, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the Medical Center. And the center’s advisory board is drawn from all Main Campus sciences as well at the Medical Center, the School of Nursing and Health Studies, the Law Center, the School of Foreign Service and the Center for Clinical Bioethics.
“One of the most exciting things is that there’s a lot of discussion going on about how the strengths across the departments will provide more opportunities for students to be more engaged in interdisciplinary programs,” says Ali Whitmer, an assistant dean in Georgetown College who focuses on the sciences. “While our faculty members all have individual strengths and their research programs stretch across the nation and around the world, there also are lots of opportunities for students to understand science as a collaborative field here at Georgetown.”
New majors approved by Georgetown’s leaders also capitalize on interdisciplinary studies and stem from the recognition that not every science student is headed to medical school, says biology department chair Douglas Eagles.
“That’s what you had in the past, but more students now are interested in research paths,” he explains. “When we get them into the department, they all start as biology students, but as their interests emerge we can start leading them down these new majors and specialties.”
A new neurobiology major within the biology department, for example, will encourage students to explore the field through coursework and research within the biology and psychology departments as well as the medical school. Students also will draw from computer science courses to obtain scientific data management skills. Another new major within the biology department is the biology of global health, which brings together environmental, genetic, computational and infectious disease aspects of biology, while also requiring students to take courses in ethics, policy, economics, law and sociology.
Alumni say this kind of interdisciplinary approach is crucial to their careers in science.
Joseph Neale (C’66, G’70), the Paduano Distinguished Professor in the department of biology, mentored Thomas Sato (G’88) for his Ph.D. in biology, but earlier Sato had studied physics and chemistry. Now Cornell University’s Joseph C. Hinsey Professor in Cell and Developmental Biology, Sato says no researcher can get by these days on the skills learned from just one field of science.
“Say you’re going to study a gene. Traditional study would look at the gene parts A, B and C, and what they do individually,” he explains. “But now you need to have a biology program that integrates every area together so you can consider the gene as a whole and how it relates to so many other genes.” His current research draws on physics, math, engineering and chemistry to study stem cells and angiogenesis, the growth of new blood cells.
“Life sciences and biology in particular are changing so rapidly,” Sato says. “Biologists have to work with other fields and collaborate to make better discoveries.”
Kate Campbell (C’01) agrees. After graduating from Georgetown, Campbell went on to earn her Ph.D. in environmental science from the California Institute of Technology. She now works as a post-doctoral fellow with the U.S. Geological Survey.
“Of course I took a lot of chemistry classes, but being a geologist means knowing about other areas too,” she says. “I had the chance to take several biology courses and even a bit of physics. Having a little taste of everything is very important because you see how everything fits together.”
Grant-Supported Research
As federal research funding dollars continue to dry up, grant administrators are increasingly demanding that research projects demonstrate cross-discipline components.
The majority of Georgetown’s faculty members in the College science departments hold significant grants from federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the departments of defense and energy, and other organizations and foundations.
Georgetown received about $9.5 million from NIH, NSF and the Department of Defense (DOD) in fiscal year 2007 for research. That represents 64 percent of the $14.8 million in federal funds awarded to Main Campus in that fiscal year. The Medical Center, which includes the School of Nursing and Health Studies as well as the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, received $118.4 million in research grants from NIH, NSF, DOD and other government sources.
Roepe, for example, works on the stubborn issue of drug-resistant malaria. In 2005, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases awarded the chemistry professor a five-year, $1.1 million grant for his project,
“The Physiology of Drug-Resistant Malaria.” He and physics professor Jeffrey Urbach are collaborating on new ways of imaging live malarial parasites within red blood cells. They also work with chemistry professors Christian Wolf and Angel de Dios.
This is just one of many science research projects at Georgetown that aim to benefit humankind.
“The Jesuit tradition of scholarship and its spirit of service are the animating forces behind everything we do at Georgetown,” says President John J. DeGioia. “So it’s not surprising that so much of the research we undertake here doesn’t just strive to advance knowledge, but to promote the common good.”
Neale also has a $1.8 million grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to support another undergraduate research effort – the Georgetown Hughes Undergraduate Research Scholars Program, a four-year, research- intensive curriculum for undergraduates interested in careers in the life sciences. The Hughes Institute has supported the program with grants for 20 years.
The biology professor says science at Georgetown will be competitive as long as the university attracts brilliant minds in professors and students alike.
Making Undergraduate Research a Priority
Campbell had the chance to go to a number of other schools, but chose Georgetown because she knew she could start conducting research right off the bat.
“I was trained from the earliest stages how to do research and conduct myself in a lab,” says Campbell, a chemistry major. “That’s really key to success later on because it’s the way science is done in the real world.”
The focus on undergraduate research is a main reason many students enroll in Georgetown’s science programs, Elmendorf says.
“We’re a student-centered research university,” she explains. “We do a pretty remarkable job of walking that balance – and it is a balance. The percent of undergraduates that participate in research is astonishingly high, anomalous for a university.”
Undergraduates in the natural sciences at Georgetown also have the benefit of working alongside and learning from graduate and post-doctoral students. This also applies to a host of other departments, including math, computer science and psychology.
“When I was deciding where to go to college, one main thing that attracted me to the physics department at Georgetown was its attention to its undergraduate students,” notes Cat Graves (C’08), who worked with Urbach. “Class sizes were small, many undergraduates formed good relationships with their advisers and teachers and students were encouraged to research early.”
The Georgetown Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (GUROP), for example, offers students the opportunity to work directly with faculty and other researchers in the field of their choice (see sidebar, pg 28).
And there are other places for undergraduates to get research experience. The School of Nursing and Health Studies, for example, has strong undergraduate science education, faculty, research and experiential learning.
Pablo Irusta, assistant professor of human science at NHS, runs a translational health science internship in Argentina, where undergraduates do basic science research and study clinical applicability. Undergraduates at NHS also present research at prestigious conferences. Allison Boyd (NHS’08), for example, traveled to Orlando, Fla., in November to present a poster on her HIV-1 research at the 2007 Sigma Xi Annual Meeting and Student Research Conference.
The Secret of Success
Space is being addressed, and research opportunities abound – but how will Georgetown’s science programs maintain success? Georgetown’s push to enhance its science programs will demand a larger faculty, professors say, and this has presented a key challenge for Georgetown.
While the average peer research institution has a faculty evenly divided between science, humanities and social sciences, Georgetown’s science faculty is far smaller than that of most other departments.
Timothy Barbari, dean and associate provost for research at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, notes that “we are smaller than our peer institutions in terms of the number of faculty in natural sciences. But our faculty is really excellent.”
How institutions are viewed externally often depends on the number of faculty members in particular fields, he says.
“If we bring more scientists to the table, that will be a main part of Georgetown emerging as a real leader in science,” Barbari says. “Science is really driven by your ideas and what you can do with them. And when you have faculty who are accomplished, who love to explore the unknown and who are committed to immersing undergraduates in their research, we will continue to have a successful science program.
”But the natural science departments have plans to increase the number of faculty in the coming years. After a long period of stagnant faculty numbers, for example, the biology department hopes to increase its full-time faculty from 17 to 25 professors. The physics department faculty has just increased from 11 to 13, and hopes to expand to 17 or so once adequate space is available. The chemistry department has 16 tenured or tenure-eligible faculty members with a plan to increase to 20 or 22.
“Science is a team sport,” Elmendorf says, “and a deeper base of faculty research programs will have synergistic effects on the quality of the science we do within each lab.”
Some of the planned expansion of faculty has to do with a movement on campus to make science classes required for all undergraduate students, much like basic humanities classes are now. Currently, Georgetown College students are required to take a science course, but foreign service and business students are not.
Success will come, Elmendorf says, with a curriculum that has “a nice breadth with pockets of depth. That is, offer more advanced courses for the students who crave science education and want to hone in on their skills. But make science available – and possibly required to take – for all.”
Chemistry department chair Richard Bates says science provides “a richer experience in all that we do. You really learn science by doing and that’s a skill that translates into other fields. Students need a better education in science, even if their careers are not going to be in the field.”
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Taking the LEED
The new science building is designed to be a model of environmentally friendly features, with Georgetown aiming for a silver rating in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) category from the U.S. Green Building Council.
Creating an environmentally friendly science building can be challenging. A lot of energy is needed to power equipment and maintain required laboratory conditions for light, humidity and temperature. Lab space also must be built from specific materials to contain fumes and protect sterile areas.
But if all goes according to plan, the new science building will contain many green initiatives that help lessen the building’s impact on the environment. They include:
Environmentally friendly building materials, such as those from recycled or rapidly renewable sources.
Rainwater from the roof and process water reused for irrigation and in the university’s cooling tower.
Wheels that recapture the heating and cooling of the building system’s exhaust air so the newly introduced fresh air will not require as much energy to either heat or cool.
Chilled beams induction to provide air heating and cooling, a more energy efficient system than fan coils.
High-performance low-energy chemical fume hoods in labs operating with 40 percent less energy than conventional hoods.
Pervious concrete walkways where storm water flows into the ground, reducing the need for water management systems.
“We're working to make sure that the Science Center and any future construction projects meet LEED certification standards to demonstrate one way that Georgetown is committed to energy efficiency and addressing sustainability issues for the long term,” says Senior Vice President Spiros Dimolitsas. “The steps we take in our planning to increase energy and water efficiency and reduce consumption will enable Georgetown to lower its overall carbon footprint and develop a framework to regularly incorporate environmentally responsible efforts in all of our capital construction projects moving forward.”
A Public Interest
Some undergraduate science students add a twist to their studies.
More than 100 physics and biology students have participated in Georgetown College’s Science on the Public Interest (SPI) program, which promotes direct dialogue with the federal government on critical scientific issues and aims to develop the next generation of citizen scientists.
Undergraduates in the program research environmental, energy, health and security issues, such as global warming and weapons of mass destruction, through a scientific lens.
In several instances, students have come up with proposals that resulted in congressional action and inspired legislation. One proposed bill dealt with making college campuses “greener” in terms of energy consumption and another aimed to provide state grants to conduct performance-enhancing drug tests on high school athletes.
SPI is co-directed by physics professor Jeffrey Urbach and Francis Slakey, the Upjohn Lecturer in Physics and Biology. Slakey stresses that the classes are meant to supplement undergraduate courses in biology and physics, not to replace them.
“This kind of program isn’t happening anywhere else in the country,” says Slakey, who also serves as director of the American Physical Society’s Washington, D.C., office. “No one else is doing this. The students’ enthusiasm is infectious once they realize they can get things done.”
One of the program’s recent classes focuses on four challenges—managing a global pandemic, containing weapons of mass destruction, meeting global energy demand and reducing carbon emissions.
Internships are also a key part of the program. Sarah Bronko (C’07) interned with the National Academies Board on Global Health at the Institute of Medicine in the spring of her senior year.
“I have developed a clear sense of the state of international health, the greatest threats to global health security, and where I might fit into the vast policy puzzle with my predominantly cellular biology background,” she wrote for the SPI Web site. The Institute of Medicine subsequently offered her a full-time position as senior program assistant working on microbial threats.
