On the Move

"You think you've seen the sun, but you ain't seen it shine." It's a line from the classic jazz song "The Best is Yet to Come," and it pretty well sums up the anticipation about research brimming from the labs and libraries and offices around George Washington University these days.

To those who might have thought they had our research standing pegged before: Grab your shades, the sun's about to shine.

Among the exciting highlights this year, the influential Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education added GW to its top tier of research schools. And, overall, the university climbed to No. 50 nationwide in the latest U.S. News & World Report rankings.

The research landscape at GW is expanding by the day.

Construction has begun on the university's new Science and Engineering Hall, which will be home to top-of-the-line core facilities and will nearly double the research space in Foggy Bottom available to a number of science and engineering departments. Currently those departments are spread across a dozen buildings on campus; bringing them together, we believe, will give our scientists an edge in finding the cross-disciplinary collaborations that are demanded by the most salient issues of our time.

We're also in the process of forging university-wide initiatives that will bring together some of the world's best minds to delve into pressing research areas. Our autism initiative, for example, will concentrate the efforts of more than 30 faculty members across GW who are studying autism or related topics, from brain development, diagnostic techniques, and cultural differences to teacher training, research methodology, and health care policy.

The other campus-wide research initiatives include: the arts, cancer, computational biology, cybersecurity, the global status of women, innovation, sustainability, and urban food studies.

To help foster innovation at GW and bring it successfully to the marketplace, we've created an Office of Entrepreneurship that oversees technology transfer. The office sponsors and works in tandem with other GW endeavors, like the annual business plan competition and the Center for Entrepreneurial Excellence, to cultivate pioneers and the budding ideas of students and faculty alike.

And most recently, to bring the marketplace to GW, we have recruited an assistant vice president of industry research, who will engage the broader business community and create partnerships to foster regional economic development.

I could go on and on, and this magazine could be filled with twice as many articles without losing a molecule of its intrigue—such is the level of activity and anticipation here. Hopefully the stories on these pages give you a hint of that.

Stay tuned. As the song says: The best is yet to come.

Sincerely,

Leo Chalupa
Vice President for Research