Corrections appended.
A world-renowned laboratory, an institution connected with 53 Nobel laureates, formalized its relationship with Brown recently. While the Marine Biological Laboratory of Woods Hole, Mass., has hosted graduate students in conjunction with Brown since 2003, the Corporation formally created the Phyllis and Charles M. Rosenthal Directorship of the Brown-MBL Partnership at its meeting last month.
The directorship is sponsored by a donation of more than $2 million from Trustee Emeritus Charles Rosenthal P'88 P'91 and his wife, Phyllis Rosenthal P'88 P'91. Rosenthal, who has served on MBL's board since the inception of the partnership, called the program the brainchild of administrators at both institutions.
In addition to the program's new director, Christopher Neill, the partnership is adding four MBL scientists to Brown's faculty as part-time professors. The program's first three graduates completed their degrees in 2009, Rosenthal said. The program's graduate students spend two years at Brown and the rest of their time at Woods Hole, according to Neill.
Though his own children studied art history and the visual arts at Brown, Rosenthal said he started to become more interested in the partnership when he began talking to scientists, following his appointment to the board.
"I got more and more excited," he said. Rosenthal, who called himself a layman, said he was inspired by people who dedicated their lives to discovery and by the discoveries that have had major implications for the world.
A better bargain for both
The joint venture, which enrolled its first students in 2003, was meant to strengthen Brown's graduate programs in science as part of President Ruth Simmons' plans for furthering the sciences at Brown, he said.
"MBL had a distinguished history and pedigree," he said. "It was and is the oldest private lab in the U.S. and, I suspect, the world. Brown, on the cheap, happened into world-renowned science."
As with any ambitious academic initiative, the commitment to building a relationship with another institution involved the approval of administrators, faculty and Corporation members.
Because the process involved two independent institutions, efforts needed to be doubled.
"It takes two," Rosenthal said.
While other schools, including Harvard, have full-fledged independent programs in the ecological sciences, Brown was looking to bolster its own program — with the limited resources at hand. Still, the partnership is not a coup for just Brown.
"Good deals are good deals if both parties benefit," Rosenthal said.
As a "soft-money" institution running primarily on grants won by individual scientists, MBL does not offer tenured appointments. Through Brown, MBL has access to additional sources of funding. Also, MBL is not a degree-granting institution, and prior to the joint program's creation, students studied there only sporadically and through a summer program.
"This all fits together," Rosenthal said.
The partnership will proceed with the input of researchers, but the catalyst for the program's development was the administration. "The real impetus came from the highest levels at Brown and MBL," Neill said. But given this top-down process, "the people who are doing this have stepped up," Neill said, referring to the researchers.
Next steps
The partnership's inaugural director is Neill, an MBL senior scientist studying ecosystems, who said he was offered the job in late November. While his new position is a joint appointment split evenly between the two institutions, four MBL scientists will hold part-time appointments at Brown. Three of the four will belong to the Department of Geology, Neill said.
The establishment of the directorship puts the program "under one roof," said Neill, whose own appointment will be with the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Though he began traveling to Brown twice a week in January, Neill said he expects to settle down and acquire a permanent office in the coming months.
The ultimate shape of the program is open-ended, and the pace of growth depends on those who participate in the program, Neill said.
"The program is not looking to grow explosively," but "quite steadily," Neill said.
There is not necessarily a set research agenda, but the four joint appointments are intended to foster interaction between specific professors at both institutions, he said, adding that scientists will need to take the initiative to begin collaborating no matter how much infrastructure the partnership's administration develops.
Immediate steps include building the graduate program's curriculum, especially by creating upper-level courses in ecosystems and ecology.
The newly expanded partnership will also benefit Brown's undergraduates — scientists from MBL will offer new courses and provide them with research opportunities, Neill said.
One of the program's goals, Neill said, was "to develop a broader umbrella for environmental research" by integrating different academic disciplines.
For example, MBL — a biological institute — could not draw on work in geology and the social sciences before its partnership with Brown. "Now, MBL is more of a player in that sort of discussion," Neill said.
"It was a partnership that seemed logical," he said.
An odd couple
Though he has advocated for expanding the program, the major impetus for the program came from the administration, according to Mark Bertness, professor of biology and the chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
The partnership was "kind of like an arranged marriage," Bertness said.
When the partners first began to interact, Bertness said, there were "massive cultural differences." MBL's unique quality is that it is a field laboratory — creating a trade-off, Neill said, between the desire to educate and the desire to focus on research.
Among the scientists at MBL, there are some who are "not involved, not interested," Bertness said. But younger scientists are "much more open to diversifying the work they do and the way they go about doing it."
This choice must be an individual one, Neill said. "Each person at MBL is free to choose the level of engagement."
"We had to spend a few years letting the cultures grow together," Bertness said. After a few years, "things were going well enough that we needed to institutionalize."
"It's absolutely mutually beneficial," he said. MBL's scientists rely on grants to fund their work, while at Brown, "we don't have the weird mentality of wondering where the next dollar is coming from," he said.
Hugh Ducklow, who runs MBL's Ecosystems Center, said that despite the institutions' distinct cultures, there are "lots of other, intellectual reasons" for the partnership. For example, Ducklow said, he appreciates the fact that MBL scientists can advise graduate students. Ducklow has mentored students in the joint graduate program and taken a Brown alum with him on a research expedition to Antarctica.
"There are synergies between research and education," he said.
Shelby Hayhoe GS, a third-year doctoral candidate in ecology and evolutionary biology, is writing her thesis under two advisers, Neill and Assistant Professor of Biology Stephen Porder.
"Only in this collaboration can I do the project I'm doing now," said Hayhoe, who studies the conversion of rainforest to soybean agriculture in South America. Though she primarily works with Neill in the field and with Porder while she is at Brown, Hayhoe said the open communication between all three of them made the project work, despite the risk that a student might get lost in the shuffle between two institutions.
"I'm psyched about it," Hayhoe said about the new directorship. "Expanding and becoming more organized can only be a good thing."
Competing for resources
The partnership is developing at a time when other projects in the sciences are coming to the University's attention — and Brown has considerably fewer resources to fund them all.
In fact, investment in the partnership was not approved at last February's Corporation meeting, according to Bertness.
There is "massive competition for resources," he said. Brown's emphasis on investing in the sciences is positive, he said, but it should not come at the expense of the humanities.
"You have to pick and choose," Rosenthal said, noting that the partnership is not very expensive.
Instead of draining resources, Rosenthal said, the program will likely attract more investment. "The tools are there," he said.
For scientists and students, the partnership already represents a productive research collaboration.
"Over time they will grow much closer together," Bertness said. "If it goes the way we envisioned, we'll look back on this as something that changed the prospects for Brown."
Due to editing errors, an earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the speaker of the quote, "Among the scientists at MBL, there are some who are ‘not involved, not interested,' " as Christopher Neill, the director of Brown's partnership with the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. In fact, Professor of Biology Mark Bertness was the speaker. The article also took out of context a statement by Hugh Ducklow, head of MBL's Ecosystems Center, that there were "lots of other intellectual reasons" for the partnership, despite the two institutions' different cultures. Bertness was making a distinction between intellectual and financial reasons for the partnership. The article also incorrectly attributed the information that the program's students spend two years at Brown and the rest of their graduate studies at MBL to Charles Rosenthal P'88 P'95. In fact, Neill was the source of this information. The Herald regrets the errors.
