The Brown Institute for Brain Sciences has surpassed the halfway mark of its $50 million fundraising goal outlined in 2012 as part of a plan authorized by then-Provost Mark Schlissel. BIBS has hired four new faculty members and has plans to recruit two more over the coming year — one in cognitive neuroscience and the other a senior level molecular neurobiologist to be housed in the Department of Neuroscience, said John Davenport, associate director of BIBS.
Researcher recruiting
When a faculty position opens in BIBS, the board must decide for which area and department within the wider University they want to recruit the person for, as well. “We come to an agreement with the department that they’ll be willing to host that person as if they were a normal member of their department,” Davenport said. Though funding for these faculty members comes through BIBS, departments provide lab and office spaces, he added.
Most of the $50 million that BIBS is in the process of fundraising will go toward hiring faculty, he said, adding that the “ultimate goal for all hires is that we have endowed professorships that support these positions and startup funds to get their labs going.”
“The people that we’re trying to recruit are also being recruited by other extremely good places. We’re competing often with much bigger research universities,” Davenport said, adding that making competitive offers is “an important part of the puzzle.”
“Mark Schlissel made a huge impact by really recognizing what it takes to recruit good people,” he added.
Since 2012, BIBS has filled four of the seven new positions — Wilson Truccolo and Alexander Jaworski joined the Department of Neuroscience, Kevin Bath joined the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences, and David Borton joined the School of Engineering, all as assistant professors.
New spaces
A second phase of the institute’s plan, which will be defined further in a meeting later this semester, will create long-term goals for BIBS and include the hiring of fourteen additional faculty members, Davenport said.
The seven Phase One positions were meant to be filled in accordance with the “existing space in the existing buildings in the existing departments,” said Davenport, but the second phase will likely not have these limitations, he added.
Davenport said he envisions that staff not only will conduct research within their own departments, but that BIBS might have its own building where faculty from many different backgrounds can collaborate together on brain science on a daily basis.
BIBS first explored this idea a year and a half ago when the University was developing a new space for engineering. At the time, the University considered developing a building, or series of buildings, to house BIBS in addition to engineering, due to the close ties between the fields.
Now that plans for the new Engineering building has been sketched out, Davenport said he hopes to “rekindle a conversation about a brain science space.”
Davenport said BIBS still needs to work out details with the University, hospitals and potentially the state.
While no exact figures have been presented for Phase Two, BIBS is having an ongoing discussion with the University about realistic goals. Other brain science institutes around the country undertaking similar projects have set their fundraising goals in the range of several hundred million dollars, Davenport said.
While the people that BIBS recruits and the quality of their research is in line with top brain science institutes, Davenport said he thinks Brown lacks the name recognition. He added that, when people think about brain science institutions, MIT, Stanford and Johns Hopkins may be the first to come to mind, all of which place in the U.S. News and World Report top ten ranking for neuroscience graduate programs.
Understanding the human brain is one of the pillars of President Christina Paxson’s Strategic Plan, and details about this pillar will be announced as part of Paxson’s to-be-announced financing campaign, Davenport said.
Diane Lipscombe, a professor of neuroscience who will take over as interim director of BIBS in January, said one of her main goals this year is to bring in “funding additive to what is already gone” in order to make sure that the junior faculty have the resources to complete research. This responsibility is shared both by BIBS and their departments, she said.
“We have great people here … who are going to be funded, but they’re in an environment right now that is more than competitive, it’s just brutal,” Lipscombe said. “The top 10 percent of grants get funded. Ninety percent of people who put in a request don’t get funded, and that’s a selective group. We constantly are thinking about that.”
Davenport said that throughout the expansion, undergraduate involvement remains a key goal of the institute. BIBS partners with the University’s Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award program to fund between four and six students’ summer work in brain science labs, he said.
The faculty members hired through BIBS will also be teaching new, specialized courses within their departments. Additionally, current BIBS projects may push faculty out of their comfort zones and into new lines of research they don’t specialize in, Davenport said, providing undergraduates the chance to pursue cross-departmental interests.
A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that one of the new faculty members will be in the Department of Psychiatry. In fact, the person will be in cognitive neuroscience, with work tying to psychiatry. The Herald regrets the error.
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