Peer Review | The Division of Biological Sciences, University of Chicago

SUMMER 2007 | VOLUME 5 | No. 2
SPOTLIGHT NEWS

Beyond Biology: New Neurosciences Institute at Chicago
In the 1990s, dubbed by Congress “the decade of the brain,” many top-tier universities—Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Berkeley, Yale and Harvard among them—gained significant recognition for their neuroscience programs.

At the same time, the National Research Council’s report of research-doctorate programs ranked neurosciences at the University of Chicago—not as an official program but based on a series of characteristics—No. 22 of 102 schools.

“The University of Chicago is famous for doing things last, but doing them exceedingly well,” said Daniel Margoliash, PhD, professor of organismal biology and anatomy. “I believe we’re poised to make major advancements in the neurosciences community.”

Margoliash can speak with some authority on the subject. He served as co-chairman of Chicago’s neurosciences taskforce, whose findings have now yielded an official change on the academic landscape: A new Neurosciences Institute, created to increase cooperation and to improve strategic planning across the campus in basic, translational and clinical research, is now an official legal entity at the university. Though the task force has accomplished its main goal—the institute’s establishment—it still seeks more support and a better-unified voice and structure.

The Neurosciences Institute isn’t the university’s first brain-related organization. In 1964, the university co-founded the Brain Research Institute with the Brain Research Foundation. The former differs from the latter in that the BRI focuses solely on the most debilitating and prevalent diseases. Meanwhile, the Neurosciences Institute will be all encompassing, potentially studying anything that relates to the brain.

There’s also a new Department of Neurobiology, only one piece of the overall institute puzzle, that’s dedicated to the biology of the brain and nervous system. Many of the faculty formerly in the Department of Neurobiology, Pharmacology & Physiology joined the new department, while others transferred to different departments. Vinay Kumar, MD, vice dean of the BSD, oversaw NPP faculty transitions. The new department will coordinate its efforts with the Neurosciences Institute.

“One of the enduring strengths of the University of Chicago is its embracing of interdisciplinary approaches to scholarship,” the task force wrote in its concluding report. “No discipline is more interdisciplinary in nature than neuroscience, and so strengthening it here will serve to bind large segments of the university together in complementary and symbiotic scholarly research.”

A cornerstone of the new institute is collaboration. “The University of Chicago is in a unique position to strengthen the integration between clinical and basic sciences,” the report noted. “There are few universities in which these two entities are physically and philosophically interwoven to the same extent.”

The task force pointed out that visiting faculty often “remark on their surprise to learn that so many good neurosciences faculty exist at the University of Chicago of whom they were unaware.”

“We have a lot of really good people here, but they’re spread out all over,” said Murray Sherman, PhD, neurobiology department chairman and, with Margoliash, task force co-chairman.

Luckily, at Chicago, “all over” is never more than a few buildings away. For example, Margoliash’s office in the Anatomy Building is a mere five-minute walk from Sherman’s in Abbott Hall, which is only a five-minute walk from the neurology department’s offices in the Brain Research Pavilion.

“The University of Chicago is truly an integrated campus,” Sherman said. “Very few medical schools are together with their campuses.”

The geographic integration combined with the administration’s increased support of cross-disciplinary research have helped get the task force as far as it is today. From there, they plan to launch a neurosciences educational program, identifying specific areas of research opportunity and generating a new fundraising model for the neurosciences that incorporates both existing assets and new resources. Sherman said that he sees promise in their progress, adding, “I know we can be in the top 10”.