|
n
my many years of pursuing academic research, I’ve learned
a thing or two. One is that research teams don’t always
work well together. Scientific egos and ambition sometimes collide,
and competition trumps collaboration. That’s anything but
the case, however, with two researchers featured in this issue,
Rafi Ahmed and Christian Larsen. As a matter of fact, they get
along so well that the NIH often turns to them for relationship
advice
to pass on to other less collegial groups. (I should note that
Ahmed and Larsen did have one recent disagreement when each wanted
the other to take credit as principal investigator on an NIH grant
exploring protective immunity.)
I obviously like telling stories
of successful collaboration. When new ideas bump up against each
other, they spark true innovation and progress. In the medical
school, we’ve placed a
premium on cutting-edge research and interdisciplinary work, which
has paid off in the amount of federal funding we attract. Over
the past few years, we have been one of the fastest growing schools
in research funding in the nation. Our interdisciplinary environment
and collaborative spirit are making Emory an attractive campus
for internationally renowned recruits such as Richard Cummings,
an expert in glycomics and the new chair of our biochemistry department,
and Edward Mocarski, who joins us as professor of microbiology
this summer.
In this issue of Emory Medicine,
almost every page touches on new projects, centers, and research
that rely on interdisciplinary collaborations—from a newly
funded nanotechnology center to research trials in cancer, from
partnerships to move new discoveries to the marketplace to improving
maternal and infant survival in Russia. Our new national screening
center for drug discovery would have been impossible without the
close relationships forged between researchers in the medical
school’s Department of Pharmacology and Emory College’s
Department of Chemistry. Our Alzheimer’s program would not
have received recent designation from the National Institute of
Aging without demonstrating many partnerships among basic scientists,
clinicians, memory and sleep researchers, radiologists, and geneticists.
These articles barely scratch the
surface of the collaborative spirit throughout the medical school
and the larger university. This climate opens new vistas for our
school. It encourages visionary innovations in medicine. It makes
Emory an exciting place to be.
|
|