PHOTO

ILLUSTRATION

BY ANN

A COBB

inter actionISSUE 2 • WINTER 2006 • STANFORD UNIVERSITY • MULTIDISCIPLINARY NEWS UPDATED AT http://mult i .stanford.edu

“People were dreaming of cinema long ago,” says Pavle Levi, an assistant professor

in Stanford’s Art and Art History Department and its new Film and Media Studies

Program. The camera obscura, a device for creating images that later would give its

name to a film studies journal, appeared in ancient China and then in Greece. Much

later, in early modern Europe, optics became a source of entertainment; a “magic

lantern” presented in 1659 was perhaps cinema’s first ancestor.

GRANTS THAT MAKE IT REALFederal agencies are encouraging multidisciplinary research and training. page 2

INDEPENDENT LABORATORIESThe network of 13 labs embraces an array of researchers from just about every discipline.page 6

NEW RULES ABOUT ACTING YOUR AGEA psychologist hopes a new multidisciplinary center on longevity will change attitudes about aging. page 6

FEMINIST STUDIES ALIVE AND WELLA quarter-century after the program was founded, it speaks to a new generation. page 12

A visionrealized

see FILM STUDIES, page 4

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MULTIDICIPLINARY NEWS UPDATED AT http://mult i .stanford.edu

Ever since Frederick B. Terman, dean of the School of Engineer-ing, came up with his notion of steeples of excellence in the 1950s, research grants have fu-eled Stanford by drawing money and ensuring that the university remains the home of some of the

world’s greatest scientists.Grants are still a prime source of en-

ergy for many Stanford schools and de-partments, and they are still on the rise. Sponsored research in fiscal year 2005 accounted for 37 percent of the universi-ty’s operating revenue, or $973 million, up 5 percent from the previous year.

What’s different about grants today and grants in Terman’s day, aside from the raw numbers, is that today’s are increasingly complicated and multifac-eted. As multidisciplinary research becomes the rule in all scientific schools and departments, grants can get difficult to administer, on the one hand, but also can become more responsive to scientific needs and inquiry, on the other. The match is by no means perfect; researchers and grant makers sometimes seem to be in a race to stay apace of each other’s agendas. But certainly the matchmaking is increas-ingly successful, and the re-sults can be seen especially in Stanford’s schools of En-gineering and Medicine.

The NSF has embarked upon a variety of initiatives to encourage multidisciplinary research and training. Since the late 1980s, the agency has funded Science and Technol-ogy Centers, which bring to-gether scientists from a broad range of disciplines. In 1995, the NSF set up an Office of Multidisciplinary Activities, whose name is self-explanatory. A program spe-cifically designed to help recent Ph.D.s acquire the cross-disciplinary training necessary for success-ful careers, the agency’s Integrative Graduate Ed-ucation and Research Traineeship (IGERT) since 1998 requires that applicants propose a compre-hensive interdisciplinary theme.

More recently, the NSF funded an 18-month report titled “A Multi-Method Analysis of the So-cial and Technical Conditions for Interdisciplin-ary Collaboration.” The report’s principal inves-tigator was Diana Rhoten, a Stanford Ph.D. in

education, who now works at the Social Science Research Council (http://hybridvigor.net/publica-tions.pl?s=interdis).

In similar fashion, the Roadmap initiative of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) outlines the crucial importance of changing the nature of the grant-giving business by removing traditional bar-riers (http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/researchteams/

index.asp). The NIH provides more money than any other single source for university research nationwide.

“Although research teams have in-cluded individuals from multiple disci-plines,” the website states, “integrating different disciplines holds the promise of opening up currently unimagined scientific avenues of inquiry and, in the process, may form new disciplines with which to tackle increasingly complex questions.”

To that end, the NIH, like the NSF, has over the past decade been fund-ing multiple-year large team projects, sometimes called centers, sometimes called glue grants. Bringing together an array of researchers, they often em-brace several institutions and include training (and cross-training) as well as

research funding. A new NIH transla-tional research grant launched in October, for ex-ample, explicitly encourages medical schools to provide a home for disciplinary-based lab scientists.

It was not always that way. Stanford’s dean of re-search and graduate policy, Arthur Bienenstock, remem-bered when his Synchro-tron Radiation Laboratory received its very first NSF funding in 1972. But the

agency just wouldn’t commit.“It was like they were interested in sex without

marriage,” Bienenstock said. “They kept insist-ing on three-year renewals. There was no mecha-nism—we were driving the loop, we were pushing for a long-term multidisciplinary view, and it was clearly awkward for them.”

But today, he laughed, “NIH almost looks like Bio-X!”

Though there are bumps along the NIH road, Stanford researchers are certainly going along for the ride. Chemist W. E. Moerner, for example, is

principal investigator for a single molecule spec-troscopy group funded by the NIH within its molecular libraries and imaging section. (http://www/stanford.edu/group/sm_cell_imaging/) Along with colleagues at Kent State University, the researchers at Stanford use lasers to observe single molecules and the proteins within them.

Moerner, biologist Lucy Shapiro and physicist Harley McAdams had all been working on a re-lated project funded by the Defense Advanced Re-search Projects Agency.

“When that project ended,” Moerner said, “I had heard about the new NIH Roadmap program asking for bold ideas. And since we had already demonstrated single-molecule imaging in bacteria, the goal was to do it better in cells with brighter objects to make them more easily detectable.”

The group needed new and better molecules. Enter Robert Twieg of Kent State University

(http://dept.kent.edu/chemistry), who just happened to be developing such things. A sort of assembly line ensued, though each step of the way involved feedback from the rest. Twieg made the molecules, Moerner measured them in model cells to see if they were good enough, and Shapiro and McAdams studied their behavior within bacteria.

“Before the 1990s, we weren’t able to follow molecules except by measuring a large number of copies at once, which

only gives an average,” Moerner explained. “Now we can look closer and ask, Do all these molecules march to the same drummer?”

Similarly cross-disciplinary research is going on at other big universities, of course, but Stan-ford has an edge, said Moerner, who with Judith Frydman was a co-recipient of one of the first Bio-X Interdisciplinary Initiatives grants in 2000.

“There are two aspects that make Stanford spe-cial,” he said. “We have a close physical connec-tion between the basic sciences, engineering and the medical community. They’re all within a few hundred yards of each other. That is very rare, and the proximity really facilitates collaboration. The second aspect is that graduate students can cross departmental boundaries, so I have students in my lab from the physical sciences, chemistry, applied physics, biophysics, etc., and they can all work together.”

As for the bumps, they are of various sorts. Managing complicated multidisciplinary grants issued by labyrinthine and bureaucratic agencies is no easy task. It is sometimes a challenge just to make researchers aware that they can breach boundaries and that there is money available to

Jeff Koseff

Anne HanniganToday, ‘NIH almost looks like Bio-X!’ Bienenstock

said, referring to the federal agency’s new dedication to cross-disciplinary research.

grants that make the research

The

possible

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see FUNDING, page 11

do that. Chris Webb, a former genome scientist who stepped over into the administrative side of research, is in charge of helping professors at the School of Medicine put together multidisciplinary grants. He said he saw plenty of colleagues strug-gling to do research on their own, unable to figure out how to link up with others.

“They needed a nice cover story,” he said, re-ferring to the challenge of showing one researcher that her narrative, as it were, could also be part of someone else’s story. Webb’s boss, Senior Asso-ciate Dean for Research Harry Greenberg, added that “most researchers are already maxed out” with their own work, “so Chris is a bridge.”

The School of Medicine pulls in more research money than any other unit at Stanford, and it generally takes care of its own grants. Like every-thing else, though, the story varies as one wanders

across the campus.Stanford’s other schools do not have someone

like Webb, and Anne Hannigan, associate vice president for research administration, says she wishes they did. Her department does what it can, she said, but younger faculty members need more assistance.

“We don’t serve them well. That’s a goal of mine, to serve them better with research prod-ucts,” she said.

All in all, however, “Stanford is in good shape,” she said. But financial administration of grants is a complicated business, with different incentives and disincentives across the university, and “the funding structure makes it more difficult for peo-ple to do business together.”

For example, in the case of a proposal coming from more than one school (chemistry is in Hu-

manities and Sciences, engineering is in Engineer-ing, radiology is in Medicine and bioengineering straddles two schools), to which agency should they apply? Who should be the principal investi-gator, or PI? How should credit be apportioned? How should different departments and schools reconcile their accounting methods? (See related article, this page.)

There is also the problem of money. More than one person interviewed for this story remarked gloomily that federal research budgets will remain flat for at least the short run. The Clinton admin-istration in 1998 embarked upon a five-year plan to double the NIH’s budget, a task completed un-der the first George W. Bush administration, but since then “we’ve seen a steady state at best,” said Marcia Hahn, of the agency’s Office of Policy for

The catalysts for research are many. But without money most research doesn’t happen.

The money, for the most part, is in Washington. Research and money engage in a mutually transformative relationship: Researchers at Stanford, like researchers anywhere else, go where the money is (one scientist called it a “command economy”), and, as a result, science and funding officials are working to make their grants more suit-able and more stimulating for multidisci-plinary research.

“All the meetings in Washington these days are about multidisciplinary research, but they haven’t figured it out,” said Anne Hannigan, associate vice president for research administration. “Everyone’s struggling to reduce barriers.”

In March 2004, a subcommittee of the White House Office of Science and

Technology Policy recommended that federal agencies adjust their policies to help improve research. Encouraging col-laborative and interdisciplinary work was high on the committee’s list. In January 2005 the administration announced it would allow research projects to have more than one principal investigator (http://rbm.nih.gov/PI_memo_050104.pdf), and in July it requested comments from the scientific community on how to implement the new policy.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) at present acknowledges only one princi-pal investigator, or PI, per project. “One of the drivers behind wanting to recog-nize multiple PIs was the strong effort by NIH to recognize team science and interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary sci-ence,” said Marcia Hahn, director of the division of grants policy at the agency’s Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration. “These are strong focus-es of NIH, and the multiple PI is part of

the changing way in which science is matching reality.”

“It’s a complex, vigorous discussion,” Hahn said of the debate among scientists over principal investigators. “Apportion-ment is a whole new kettle of fish.”

With a single principal investigator, only one person and that person’s institu-tion get maximum glory, even if (as is frequently the case) there are subsidiary collaborators on the grant. For some scientists, that system makes the most sense, but for many others—especially those whose universities use PI status as a criterion for tenure—it is both unfair and an unreliable way of assessing research. For them, credit and funding must be reapportioned.

If indeed the NIH opts for the multiple PI system, Hahn said, it probably will introduce what amounts to a prenuptial agreement in case “researchers fall out of love.” It also will ask the participating research institutions to appoint one per-

son as the principal NIH contact, some-one who would get more paperwork than glory, though they’re not mutually exclusive. Chemist W. E. Moerner, for example, principal investigator on an ongoing four-year, $2.9 million grant, said he spent three weeks in spring writing the annual progress report and a detailed budget for the next cycle.

The transformation would be substan-tial for the NIH, which has a far more hands-on approach to grant-giving than its sister institution, the National Sci-ence Foundation (NSF). Every step of the process for the NIH is predicated upon there being one principal investigator, which means that databases, finances and legal arrangements all will undergo an overhaul, Hahn said.

At the NSF, meanwhile, multiple princi-pal investigators are old hat. Essentially, the agency lets the applicant institutions (or departments) sort out the hierarchy

Chemist W.E. Moerner is principal investigator for a single molecule spectroscopy research group funded by the National Institutes for Health.

Who’s in charge?

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In the 1870s, Eadweard Muybridge’s pho-tographs of Leland Stanford’s galloping horses marked the beginning of a new revolution in representation. His images’ direct progeny, film, would become the definitive cultural form of the 20th century.

Today people no longer dream of cinema. They study it.

When the first film stud-ies programs began appearing, they generally were housed in literature departments. Movies, after all, conveyed stories, and the art and theory of criticizing narratives on paper were, it was thought, easily transferable to narratives on a screen.

In the 1970s , Marshal l McLuhan’s ideas about the mas-saging influence of the “mass media” gave new prominence to the technology of film, and the subject drifted into media and communication departments.

That is where it has resided at Stanford until now. The an-nouncement last fall of the uni-versity’s born-again Film and Media Studies Program, housed in the Department of Art and Art History, signaled not only the start of an exciting curriculum and degree program but the reso-lution of a disciplinary journey.

Film is generally studied in two ways, said Associate Profes-sor Scott Bukatman, the direc-tor of undergraduate studies for the program: as an art in and of itself (as in “the art of Fellini”) or as the bearer of ideology. The name “Film and Media Stud-ies” encompasses both the artis-tic and the cultural meanings of the medium, he said, acknowl-edging that film can be studied as an art form or, for example, as a vehicle of ideas about gender, race or class.

But it cannot be studied as an on-screen version of literature, Bukatman said. “Film is different. You can’t reproduce film like you can reproduce a quotation or a painting. It’s ‘something else,’ and that something else is more fundamental than narrative.” And, he pointed out, “there are also non-narrative aspects of film.”

It’s not an easy problem figuring out the nature of the beast, though students, he said, understand clearly that the muse required to produce a poem is a different creature than that required to pro-duce a film.

“We’re not inventing a discipline,” said Levi, Bukatman’s junior colleague. “Film studies is al-ready a discipline, and it’s interdisciplinary. That’s a key point. It’s not simply something mapped across other disciplines. It has an autonomy and systems of study of its own.

“I like that film studies at Stanford will be in art,” he said. “In many schools, art and art history are separate. Here they coexist, which is the most productive symbiotic relationship. Film studies will have two components—film studies and film-making; one academic, the other production. It’s a smaller version of the division between art and art history. So it’s a great, creative laboratory.”

In the new program, a terminal two-year Mas-ter of Fine Arts degree will replace the existing master’s degree, which was essentially about production. The M.F.A. will be more academic, though practice will never be out of the picture. Aesthetics, technology and social analysis will all

have a place. There also will be a new undergrad-uate film studies major (with various tracks) and a minor, and doctoral students from Art and Art History will be able to concentrate on film (http://art.stanford.edu/graduate.php?content=film).

“Stanford is a latecomer [to film studies], but that can be an advantage,” said Levi, whose first book is on the relationship of aesthetics, ideology and ethnicity in the cinema of the former Yugo-slavia. “We want to be cutting-edge. So we have a

dual task: respecting the past and charting new ground.”

At present there are four faculty members in the pro-gram: Director Kristine Sam-uelson, Bukatman, Levi and Jan Krawitz, a documentary filmmaker who will join Sam-uelson in moving from Com-munication to Art next fall. They are conducting a search for a junior specialist in Asian cinema; Samuelson hopes that after that, they can hire a film production instructor and then a senior scholar to lead the program once she steps down in three years.

The field of film studies in a way is suffering from its own success. Many classes in humanities and social sci-ences departments have at one time or another featured films. Partly that may be because it’s an easy bet stu-dents will pay closer atten-tion, but it also reflects the belief that everyone figures they can “watch” films and understand what they’re see-ing. What’s to study?

Such assumptions on the part of nonexperts are of some concern to the new program’s leaders.

“There are lots of intersec-tions” with other fields, “but there also must be limits,” Samuelson said. “We have to embrace faculty who teach

film, but it can get complicated.” The new program therefore will include a rigorous core series taught by film studies faculty. “We have to delicately but clearly establish the parameters,” she said.

In Levi’s view, “People in other departments study film, and that’s fine. We want to encourage that. But it must be mutual, and we must have au-tonomy. Inversely, I could teach a course in a liter-ature department, but the course pertains to them. That’s the dynamic that has to be maintained.”

The ubiquity of film in curricula and confer-ences is, then, good news and bad news. The emergence of “visual studies” and “cultural stud-ies” tacitly or explicitly recognizes and salutes film’s key position in modernity, but at the same time these new fields can overlook film’s specific-ity. They juxtapose the textual, the concrete and the conceptual; they link aesthetic and material concerns, art and commerce, the viewer and the viewed. The overwhelming importance of Michel Foucault’s writings in the past few decades has made it virtually impossible to disengage looking/seeing from social power or to overlook the per-formative nature of social acts. Walter Benjamin, a major reference point in literary studies, wrote in his famous 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” that film was different from all other art forms because of its reproducible nature and its subsequent loss of aura. That meant that spectators saw and under-stood film differently from the way they saw and understood art forms displayed in the hallowed ground of museums. Audiences were “politi-

cized,” Benjamin said, as artistic creation ceased being regarded as magical and as reception of im-ages was widely and simultaneously shared.

So, literature, history and theory are paying at-tention to visual objects in a way they never did before. Nonetheless, film still sits apart. As Bukat-man points out, it’s not just a visual art. There’s sound, too.

“I don’t like what happened,” Levi said, refer-ring to film studies’ movement toward cultural studies. “Why study film? You can study litera-ture and film and furniture, for that matter, and see them all as cultural objects, but then it’s not about film anymore.”

Bukatman’s work exemplifies how film studies can be both rigorously about film and at the same time about many other things. Indeed, the list of his research interests might make other academics realize with a jolt that other people have more fun than they do. Bukatman lately has been studying superheroes and comics, phenomena that are flam-boyant, urban, literally in-your-face. He’s also in-terested in performance, be it musicals, comics or pornography, and the links between technology, human perception and bodily experience.

Science fiction, for him, is a place where all these things blend, where audiences are forced to constantly examine themselves, their perspec-tive and their agency. In his brief and articulate introduction to the British Film Institute’s book on the film Blade Runner, Bukatman remarked that “through the language, iconography and nar-ration of science fiction, the shock of the new is aestheticised and examined.” The relationship between us and the performer, in other words, becomes a means for evaluating our world, its complexity and development. The rules of engage-ment with on-screen utopias and dystopias do not allow for passivity.

In November it was Bukatman’s pleasure to in-troduce Linda Williams, an acclaimed film scholar at the University of California-Berkeley, who was the Marta Sutton Weeks Distinguished Visitor at the Humanities Center (http://shc.stanford.edu/events/lindawilliams_0506.htm). Williams has written extensively on race, sexuality and pornog-raphy; she manages to combine intellectual rigor with both the appeal and the topicality that befits her subject matter. Bukatman’s opening remarks and Williams’ subsequent lectures and seminars pointed to their field’s range. He spoke admiringly about the fact that her work constantly makes un-expected connections—between musicals and por-nography, for example, or between race and melo-drama—and her talk that evening, about the ins and outs of on-screen kissing, proved him right.

On the production end, and for something completely different, take the work of Samuelson, an independent film producer. Last June she pro-duced a project called “Point 25,” named for the quarter-second time delay of a fast Internet con-nection between Stockholm and Stanford. Using a two-screen video installation she designed, two musicians at each of those sites played in full sight (and sound) of each other and of their respective audiences. The event in the “cyber concert hall” was followed by a cyber reception, which at this end was held at Wallenberg Hall (http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2004/july7/globe-jam-77.html). Samuelson also collaborates with Media X (http://mediax.stanford.edu/) and with the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (http://ccrma.stanford.edu/).

As Samuelson’s and others’ work makes evi-dent, if there’s something not quite right about stuffing film into “visual studies,” there’s also a problem with the term “film studies” itself, which is that most moving images we see today aren’t film at all; they’re digital. “The movies” today are not necessarily in a theater; rather, images are ev-erywhere, and they “move” with us on electronic devices in our pockets and purses.

So, if centuries ago people dreamed of cinema, today they dream of a multitude of portable,

Film Studiescontinued from page 1

‘You can’t reproduce film like you can reproduce a

quotation or a painting. It’s “something else,” and that “something else” is more

fundamental than narrative,’ Bukatman said.

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adaptable, interactive screen images.“We need to define what we study and what we

don’t,” Levi said. “We live in a completely image-saturated society, and film studies has to adapt itself. That’s the good side of the shift. Film schol-ars are well equipped to address these expanded forms of moving images.”

In exactly that vein, Bukatman, in his Blade Runner essay, commented on “the emergence of a new subjectivity constructed at the computer station or television screen,” that is, the con-struction “of a new position from which humans could interface with the global, yet hidden, realm of data circulation.”

The curator for the new film studies program is Henry Lowood, co-director of the Stanford Humanities Lab and curator of the Germanic and History of Science and Technology collec-tions at Stanford University Libraries. Lowood has a good head start as curator of the film stud-ies collection, Bukatman said, because Stanford has an excellent collection of films and interac-tive software and games.

Lowood also knows a thing or two about Bukatman’s interest in subjectivity and screens. He co-directs (with Tim Lenoir, formerly of the History Department) “How They Got Game,” a many-limbed project at the Humanities Lab about video games (http://shl.stanford.edu/research/how_they_got_game.html). Among its spin-offs was an exhibit at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco called “Bang the Machine: Computer Gaming Art and Artifacts” (http://www.ybca.org/inside/press/press03/games.html).

Where Lowood shares common ground with many colleagues in film studies is in his interest in the creative interaction of players (or perform-ers), technology and spectators. In October 2004 he was a referee at the World Cyber Games in San Francisco (which drew a mere 5,000 view-ers; in their home, Korea, they attract 100,000 people over three days, he said). Such a specta-cle, he said, calls into question the meaning of “performer” and “audience,” as the people in the stands, most of them young men, are watch-ing enlarged screens depicting exactly what the player, or performer, is seeing.

Lowood teaches a course called History of Computer Game Design, taken mostly by stu-dents from Computer Science or the Interdisci-plinary Studies in Humanities honors program (http://www.stanford.edu/class/sts145/). He is less

interested in game development than in game par-ticipation, and the issues raised in his classes in-clude matters such as: How does the structure of a game propel the narrative? Why have games been treated as if they were linear, authored media? To what degree are players consumers or producers? And what sort of community do they create?

Those are all questions that one could imag-ine being echoed, or at least adapted, in the con-text of film studies. Indeed, Lowood drew a close comparison. “Game studies means research on game development and the social and cultural contexts of digital games,” he said. “The relation-ship between the development and study of games is similar to art versus art history,” or between filmmaking and film studies.

The film studies program will form a vital part of Stanford’s fourth multidisciplinary initia-tive, devoted to arts and creativity, which is be-ing spearheaded by Bryan Wolf of the Art and Art History Department and Jonathan Berger of the Music Department.

But, as with everything else at Stanford, space and money are issues. The latter was alleviated somewhat when alumnus and film director Jay Roach gave $1 million in flexible endowment for the program, which was matched by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

As for space, for the past several years there has been talk of concentrating Stanford’s vari-ous arts program in one place to create an “arts district” adjacent to the Cantor Center for Visual Arts. Samuelson believes strongly that studio art, art history, film and design (including the School of Engineering’s new Hasso Plattner Institute of Design) need to be in the same place. Like people at the Medical School or the Engineering School or any other academic site where new disciplinary partnerships are being forged, she recognizes that proximity is key.

While the new buildings would be fantastic, of course, Bukatman says hE n SRo longer thinks they’re essential at the moment. The program can start without them. Indeed, it has. When he intro-duced Williams at the Humanities Center, saying he was doing so on behalf of the “Film Studies Program in the Art and Art History Department,” he stopped, amazed at what he had just said. “I would never have believed I’d ever be saying those words together,” he explained.

Levi, who was hired last year specifically to help get the program going, is equally amazed.

“What I love most about Stanford is that from my first day here, there was an insistence on multi-disciplinarity,” he said. “Film studies can thrive here. We’re positioning ourselves in the best pos-sible way.”

Professor Kristine Samuelson, above, the director of the

new Film and Media Studies Program, last year produced

Point 25, a cyber-spectacle in Wallenberg Hall involving

musicians in Sweden and Stanford, below. Opposite

page: Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of Leland

Stanford’s galloping horses marked the beginning of a

new revolution in representation.

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Lab” may evoke visions of scien-tists in white coats; the important thing to note is not what they’re wearing but that they’re working together. Since 1949, Stanford’s independent lab system has pro-vided the basis for collaborative, multidisciplinary research here.

And participants may not be wearing lab coats; in fact, they may not be scientists.

The network of 13 labs embraces an array of researchers from just about every field. There are physicists at Ginzton, Hansen, Kavli and Geballe, but physicists might also collaborate with the Global Climate and Energy Project, where ecol-ogists and natural scientists might also work at Bio-X or the Institute for the Environment, whose social scientists might also find a home at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, where policymakers might also properly belong at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, which in turn has launched a fellowship program with the Humanities Center. (See box, page 8.)

As disciplines themselves stretch in new ways, their practitioners may find themselves literally all over the place.

“Stanford has always been happy to accom-modate interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research by building centers and labs,” says Dean

of Research Arthur Bienenstock, “but now we are entering a period in which the university is ac-tively encouraging this research.”

“Most interdisciplinary work is with just a few professors and it doesn’t require a huge level of coherence and organized efforts,” Bienenstock said. “But now we’re taking in a much broader sphere and we will require an array of capabili-ties much broader than before. So this is different. We have to meet the needs of the departments but also build strengths to make programs work in an organized manner.”

The changes Bienenstock referred to are part of the university’s campaign to exponentially boost multidisciplinary research, a campaign in which the independent labs will play a key role.

The proximity of collaborators from different disciplines has always been a hallmark of Stan-ford. Very few (if any) universities can boast of a medical school, hospital, science departments and engineering school within five minutes’ walking distance of one another. The tradition of faculty living on campus also has contributed to an at-mosphere of multidisciplinary give and take. Bie-nenstock, at a November talk that was part of the “What Matters to Me and Why” series at Memo-rial Church, remembered that in the early years he met a geologist over a lawn mower, and a research project was born.

The coming, going and morphing of indepen-

dent labs, of course, to some degree simply reflects the general state of knowledge, both at Stanford and beyond. In 1992, for example, the leaders of the Institute for Mathematical Studies in the So-cial Sciences (IMSSS), one of the pioneers in the study of computers and learning, decided that af-ter more than 30 years the time had come to put it to rest. Some of the institute’s projects were trans-ferred to the Center for the Study of Language and Information, in many ways the natural successor to IMSSS. (See story, page 8.)

Now, three new efforts are in line to become in-dependent labs, devoted to, respectively, longevity (see story, this page), ultrafast science and global positioning technology (http: //news-service. stanford.edu/news/2005/september28/scpnt-092805.html).

As labs come and go (they come more than they go), physical space is something that can both de-fine and differentiate them. Some directors insist on the importance of a separate building; some don’t need a building but do need administrative independence, principally for fundraising; other research centers are not formal independent labs at all, but do their multidisciplinary work under the auspices of one of the seven schools, which works just fine for them.

Stanley Peters, a linguist, is of the firm opinion that without the independent lab system, the Cen-ter for the Study of Language and Information

THE STRUCTURES OF MULTIDISCIPLINARITY

New center on longevity

To be independent or to seek a home with others? The road to becoming an independent lab is neither short nor easy. Some researchers might think the costs outweigh the benefits. For others, such as Laura Carstensen, a lifespan developmental psychologist, indepen-dence is essential for the integrity and success of the research project.

The future Stanford Center on Lon-gevity, directed by Carstensen, is likely to become the university’s next indepen-dent lab. The center’s ultimate aim is to improve the well-being of aging individu-als, which means everybody. Carstensen takes great pains to point out that lon-gevity is not a synonym for old age.

She began the march to indepen-dence in 2004, when she met with President John Hennessy, Provost John Etchemendy and Dean of Research Arthur Bienenstock (the latter two both former directors of independent labs), as well as with potential donors, to pro-pose a bold, multidisciplinary, freestand-ing research center.

According to the report issued by the Provost’s Exploratory Committee on Longevity, which came into existence as a result of Carstensen’s proposal, Stan-ford is home to a multitude of research-ers in an array of fields relevant to lon-gevity who nonetheless have no way of

working with each other or even of know-ing about each other’s work. The report furthermore states that basic research is often difficult to translate into policy or to implement in such a way as to make a difference in people’s lives.

“This will be more interdisciplinary than anything else on campus,” Carstensen said confidently in the fall. “The nature of the subject naturally embraces all seven schools. There were deans who would have liked to house it [in their schools], because it will bring in money, but that would defeat the point.”

Declining the deans’ offers of hospi-tality, Carstensen instead chose to work with Bienenstock, whose job, she said, “is to ensure the good of the university as a whole.”

Carstensen envisions a place, a phys-ical place, where people will be able to meet. If the funding goes well, which she expects it will, the center should be up and running in five years. The building would be a permanent home for staff and a temporary home for researchers, professionals and policymakers from Stanford and elsewhere. The center would fund translational research by, for example, patent attorneys and entrepre-neurs, and would have what Carstensen called a department of cultural change, where academics, journalists and survey-takers could study and share information about the aging process. Projects would be clustered among five research sec-tions: brain and mind; social innovations;

sensation and locomotion; healthy living and disease prevention; and disparities, focusing on social and genetic risks faced by specific individuals or groups.

“The goal is to change the nature of human aging,” Carstensen said. “We’re not going to cure disease. We want to change the way people live at all ages.”

Within that perspective, Carstensen and others believe that our lives are organized around a chronology that makes little sense.

“The extra years don’t have to come at the end,” she pointed out. Why not pay Social Security benefits to people raising children, for example, when they need to be at home? Many old people are perfectly capable of working and might not need the income then, par-ticularly if they’ve earned well throughout their lives.

Changing our notion of age, she said, “involves talking to children, changing the way universities operate, setting up businesses, intervening in national poli-cy. We can turn an average of 30 extra years into an extraordinary advance in human life.”

To that end, engineers and physicians and social scientists and entrepreneurs need to put their heads together. “This coming together is possible because we all face a common problem,” Carstensen said, “and we all need each other in order to fix things.”

Carstensen is no stranger to inter-disciplinary research and collaboration.

From 1997 to 2001 she was director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, where for two years she led a project on aging under the rubric of IRWG’s “Difficult Dialogues” program. Participants from Stanford and else-where concluded that there is a clear correspondence between gender and race, on the one hand, and difficulties in aging, on the other. How one ages has a lot to do with who one is. Most obviously, the world of the very old is a female world. And it’s an increasingly populous world.

When Carstensen said that changing our notion of age involves talking to children, she specifically mentioned the Stanford Center on Adolescence, run by education Professor William Damon, one of the members of the Provost’s Exploratory Committee on Longevity (h t tp://www.stanford.edu/group/ adolescent.ctr/).

The Center on Adolescence was founded in 1996 with a $1.2 million, two-year grant from the Carnegie Corpo-ration of New York to promote multidis-ciplinary research and training.

The two centers, which have plans to work together and might even eventually live together, are models of the differ-ent routes leading to multidisciplinary research. When Damon, an expert on moral development, was hired in 1997 from Brown University after a wide-rang-ing, nationwide search, he was given

“

A System of Collaboration

see LO N G EV IT Y, page 8

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‘It’s essential that departments and schools continue to exist .... They

are literally the foundation of the university,’

Vonder Linden said.

A System of Collaborationwould never have come into existence. It needed to be an independent lab, he said.

“Stanford organizes interdisciplinary research in different ways; sometimes it’s attached to de-partments, to the extent that the department is interdisciplinary,” he said. “Sometimes it’s attached to schools. So partly it’s a bu-reaucratic arrangement, but Stanford has always sup-ported weird groups of faculty getting together.”

“Sometimes,” said Carol Vonder Linden, the assistant dean of research, “a center needs to be standalone to get the attention it deserves. But sometimes not.”

Some centers affiliated with a school later became indepen-dent labs. In other instances, as with the Institute for Re-search on Women and Gender and the former Center for Chicano Research, it’s the other way around. Independent labs are not assumed to be permanent entities, either physi-cally or administratively. They have a life cycle.

“When faculty request an independent lab, it means they’re collaborating already,” Vonder Lin-den pointed out. “They say, ‘We need a structure,

we need an animal to care for the administration of this.’”

Because each one of these “animals” requires new space, even if it doesn’t have its own building, and new administrative and research resources,

petitioners must be vetted by department chairs and the relevant deans before a for-mal proposal is even submit-ted. Once vetted, the matter goes to the dean of research, and from there to the pro-vost. University policy RPH 2.9 (http://www.stanford.edu/dept/DoR/rph/2-9.html) states specifically that inde-pendent labs are “exceptions to the principle of organizing our research programs within regular academic channels,” and the organizers of the new venture therefore must make an ironclad case that their

purposes cannot be fulfilled by ordinary means.Even with those administrative guarantees in

place, there are some who believe more attention will need to be paid to structural issues as multi-disciplinary research becomes the order of the day.

“Stanford needs to find a better way of man-aging interdisciplinary work other than setting

up independent labs, because eventually the whole university is going to be an independent lab,” said Amy Balsom, senior associate dean for finance and administration at the School of Earth Sciences. “We’re going to get more and more fragmented.”

That’s one scenario; another is that Stanford will run out of space, of which there is a finite amount. Faculty researchers in independent labs generally have two offices or spaces; one at the lab, another at their department. Provost John Etchemendy (himself the former director of an in-dependent lab) told Stanford Report in October that there is no unallocated space left on campus, though there is unoccupied space. Allocation is made through schools and departments, yet one of the reasons for the pressure on space is the growth of multidisciplinary research. Moving off campus, which is one solution, would relieve the pressure, but it also would work to counter-act that long Stanford tradition of mixing it up on campus, and would make it more difficult for students to participate.

Not all independent labs require new build-ings or physical proximity. The decision seems to depend on the subject matter, existing collabora-tion and the individuals involved. Yet clearly some physical contact is necessary, if just a meeting room with a good coffee maker.

Psychologist Laura Carstensen, left; teaching assistant

Cara Rice, center; and neurologist Thomas Rando are

co-teaching a course this quarter called Longevity.

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a choice: Make it freestanding or find a home for it. Choosing the latter, he turned to the School of Education. (Had the incoming director been from anoth-er field, he or she and the center could have been housed in the director’s respective school or department.)

“I went to Education for practical reasons,” he said, “because I didn’t want to have to fundraise for staff and infrastructure.” School of Education Dean Deborah Stipek gives him all that, leaving him free to raise funds solely for research.

“But I’ll be frank; there are down-

sides,” he added, and they sound a lot like the downsides Carstensen wanted to avoid, namely being overly associ-ated with one field over another.

“Once you’re in an existing depart-ment or school, [the university expects] everything to come from them. It’s a snowball effect, so we’re more and more slanted toward education,” Damon said.

It is also difficult to attract the inter-est of researchers outside the field of education, he said. And, because physical space is allotted by depart-ments and schools, which by definition are rooted in disciplines, his new home (he is currently in Cypress Hall) will be

at the Center for Educational Research at Stanford, a fine building, but one obviously connected to the School of Education.

It would be ideal, Damon said, if the university had “a separate pot for multidisciplinary space.”

“I’m not complaining,” he hastened to add. “Stanford is a great place, and this center will exist in perpetuity. But there are tradeoffs.”

His particular research is called “youth purpose,” an approach that emphasizes the aspirations and poten-tial of young people rather than the pit-falls and dangers they encounter. When he arrived at Stanford, he said, the

hallway of the pre-existing center was lined with depressing posters announc-ing the numbers of teen suicides, teen pregnancies and teen drug overdoses. They’re gone.

Young people have a different atti-tude toward aging than older people, Carstensen said, noting that Damon’s work therefore will be invaluable to her project. Damon called their shared interest “successful aging.”

“Younger people see time as infinite; we recognize limits,” she said. “Older people gather less information and are more focused on emotionally meaning-ful things. But when younger people’s relationship to time changes, and sud-

“[Physical] structures respond to the needs of interdisciplinarity,” said Roy Pea, co-director of the Center for Innovations in Learning. But likewise, all the interdisciplinary intentions in the world will not bear fruit if researchers can-not actually be in the same room. One of the top recommendations of a 2004 National Academy of Sciences report, “Facilitating Interdisciplin-ary Research,” was that universities foster a col-laborative environment for researchers, including physical places; one center director quoted by the

NAS called interdisciplinary research “a body-contact sport.”

Beyond potential physical and administra-tive challenges, any university trying to go from merely accommodating multidisciplinary research to encouraging it faces an intellectual challenge: How does one balance that goal and the goal of ensuring that department members are the best in their field and that graduate students receive a rig-orous disciplinary education?

Among other things, university policy RPH 2.9 asks independent lab petitioners to explain how the new center will have a negative or positive im-

pact on the participating faculty members’ home departments. According to the worst-case sce-nario, researchers could go AWOL, never again to be seen by their department, too busy at the new lab doing cutting-edge work on the outer limits of the discipline to pay attention to the business of their departments or core research needs.

There’s a corollary to that scenario: If the wan-dering researcher is a junior faculty member, all that work on the edges is unlikely to be rewarded at tenure time.

The Office of the Dean of Research is certainly aware of these doomsday visions and, while tak-

Stanford University Independent LabsBio-X,

http://biox.stanford.edu

Center for the Study of Language and Information,

http://www-csli.stanford.edu

Edward L. Ginzton Laboratory,

http://www.stanford.edu/group/ginzton/index.html

Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies,

http://fsi.stanford.edu

Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials,

http://www.stanford.edu/group/glam

Global Climate and Energy Project,

http://gcep.stanford.edu

Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology,

http://www-group.slac.stanford.edu/kipac

Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning,

http://scil.stanford.edu

Stanford Humanities Center,

http://shc.stanford.edu

Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research,

http://siepr.stanford.edu/home.html

Stanford Institute for the Environment,

http://environment.stanford.edu

Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society,

http://www.stanford.edu/group/siqss/home/home.htm

W.W. Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory,

http://www.stanford.edu/group/help/

The logic of language and learning

‘Understanding how people did complex projects, we thought, would help us improve computers,’

Perry said.

It should come as no surprise that the interface between human beings and technology is an area teeming with re-searchers at Stanford.

What exactly goes on in that inter-face? People use tech-nology to study how people learn. They ob-

serve how people react—psy-chologically, cognitively, emo-tionally—to technology. They invent software that speaks to users in a language that makes sense to them; figure out if ba-bies actually learn something from computer screens; study the similarities between human and artificial brains. In short, they explore the limitless fac-ets of communication among and between humans and ma-chines.

An enterprise like this is an obvious candidate for independent labs, which provide not only a space, physical and/or virtual,

for cross-disciplinary collaboration, but also the flexibility and autonomy to go wherever the re-search needs to go.

At present much of that activity is taking place at two such labs: the Center for the Study of Lan-

guage and Information (CSLI) and the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning (SCIL).

Their missions and re-search often overlap. The director of CSLI, Byron Reeves, for example, is also the director and co-founder of Media X, a partnership network with private com-panies devoted to studying interactive technology. Me-dia X is housed in the tech-rich Wallenberg Hall, which is managed by SCIL. Reeves also co-directs a project with Roy Pea, co-director

of SCIL, called LIFE, dedicated to figuring out how people learn and also located in Wallenberg

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Longevitycontinued from page 6

Professor Byron Reeves, right, is the director of the

Center for the Study of Language and Information and is

also director and co-founder of Media X.

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denly it’s not infinite because they’re considering a subset of time, then they behave differently.”

At that point, she said, “Students get it. They can see that age is a mat-ter of time, and they can relate.”

Carstensen envisions the Center on Longevity having links to multidisci-plinary centers and institutes beyond the Center on Adolescence. For exam-ple, new devices will enable aging people to maintain their participation in active daily life, so the Institute of Design could have a role; public-opin-ion surveys can point to widely held biases and needs, so the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences could

have a role; people age differently in different parts of the world, so the Freeman Spogli Institute for Interna-tional Studies could have a role.

Brain function certainly is a crucial piece of aging, and it is with, precisely, a neurologist that Carstensen is prepar-ing the way for the future independent lab this quarter by team-teaching an undergraduate class called Longevity (Psychology 102). Her partner in this venture is Dr. Thomas Rando, a winner last year of the prestigious National Institutes of Health Director’s Pioneer Award for his work on stem cells and degenerative disease.

Just three weeks into the quarter,

the two instructors agreed that the class is going well and that students appear to be engaged.

“It’s also notable that every sin-gle faculty member we’ve invited to attend as a guest has enthusiastically accepted the invitation,” Carstensen said. Those guests represent six of the university’s seven schools. “It’s exciting to be able to change the way younger people are thinking about aging indi-viduals and aging societies. I think the course will become an integral part of the [center’s] ‘culture change’ mis-sion.”

Next year, Carstensen will start building a national and international

research network and soliciting pro-posals for projects and visitors to the center. By 2007-08, according to the provost’s report, a physical space should be ready to house at least temporary flexible research space. The long-term plan calls for a space simi-larly innovative and flexible as the Clark Center, home to Bio-X.

“Ultimately,” the report says, “a space that houses the entire opera-tion is important. It is clear that the power of proximity cannot be over-stated.”

ing them seriously, insists the dangers are both ex-aggerated and manageable.

Vonder Linden is emphatic that “it’s essential that departments and schools continue to exist. There’s no desire or need to ever, ever do away with schools. They are literally the foundation of the university, and education within the school structure is vital.”

Disciplines, according to Bienenstock, “are like the driver’s license that allows graduate students and ideas to move from place to place. So we have to keep disciplines strong.” But, he added, “there is interesting research at the borders.”

As with any momentous change, if all the parts don’t transform together and at the same speed, there are bound to be imbalances and inequities, at least for a while. Prime among them is the re-ality that multidisciplinary research is simultane-ously rewarded and punished, or at least facili-tated and impeded. One can’t be at the periphery and at the core simultaneously, yet that’s what ap-pears to be needed.

“We’re stuck at a funny time,” said Anne Han-nigan, associate vice president for research admin-istration, speaking last summer. “We have paral-lel structures that aren’t interfacing nicely.”

One solution is to adjust the rules on hiring, promotion and tenure. Over the years, schools have occasionally shared posts (Bienenstock, in fact, was hired in 1967 by Engineering and Hu-manities and Sciences). Such über-billets are defi-nitely in Stanford’s future, according to virtually all the center directors and researchers consulted for this article. The prospect is a truly exciting one for many of the leading players. One of the reasons the environmental and international ini-tiatives have legs is precisely that they will include new billets not confined to any particular school.

(http://life-slc.org/).Altogether, Reeves said, there are some 10 cen-

ters, labs or groups on campus studying language-related technologies and the intersection between the human sciences and technology.

Back in the 1980s, when Apple was hiring phi-losophy graduate students to apply their powers of abstract thinking to the challenges of comput-ers, a group of scholars at Stanford founded CSLI to study the emerging science of information, computing and cognition. They hailed from lin-guistics, philosophy, education, psychology and

the relatively new field of computer science. Their mission was to develop software and other tech-nology that responded to the structures and needs of human intelligence and language.

“The aim was to get computers to be more in-telligent,” recalled John Perry, the Henry Wald-grave Stuart Professor of Philosophy and a for-mer CSLI director. “Understanding how people did complex projects, we thought, would help us improve computers. So philosophy was an impor-tant part of the mix. You had computer scientists reading Heidegger, for goodness’ sake.” But as

the computers got much, much smarter, the phi-losophers became less valuable.

When CSLI was born, it was well funded thanks to a start-up grant from the Systems De-velopment Foundation, an indirect offshoot of the RAND Corporation. (The foundation had issued a request for multidisciplinary proposals, and when those from Stanford, SRI International and Xerox PARC looked similar, SDF suggested they combine their efforts, which they did.) The money went into projects, some outstanding

The Center for the Study of Language and Information, which is housed in Cordura Hall, is among the independent laboratories with their own building.

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“We’ll work out a mechanism,” Bienenstock said, with the wisdom acquired from years of ad-ministrative and policy work, both at Stanford and in Washington, D.C. “We’ll face problems one at a time. You just watch out, proceed along and be careful.”

Balsom, too, though concerned about the specter of the sorcerer’s apprentice creating more and more autonomous centers, is confident Stanford can fig-ure this out. “Every faculty member who comes from outside says we can do things better here than elsewhere. But it’s not pretty. The delivery happens because we have good personal relationships and there’s a lot of trust. You work with colleagues across the disciplines, and things happen.”

Bienenstock, at the center of Stanford’s bet that multidisciplinary work is a powerful way of both advancing scientific knowledge and solidifying Stanford’s preeminence, is eager to move forward.

“Let me make something clear,” he said. “Whenever you go down a new path, you’re bound to encounter problems.” The implication, of course, is that those who seek them will also encounter solutions.

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hires (including logician John Etchemendy, Per-ry’s graduate advisee and current provost) and a beautiful new building, Cordura Hall. Since the money ran out, researchers have raised their own, which they’ve found mostly at the National Sci-ence Foundation and at various military agencies.

Linguist Stanley Peters, for example, another former CSLI director and the current director of the Computational Semantics Laboratory, which studies the intersection of linguistics and com-puter science (also called computational linguis-tics), is working on a project funded by the Office of Naval Research to see how (or if) robots can teach humans in a language that is mutually intel-ligible and accessible.

One of CSLI’s earliest offspring was not a proj-ect at all but a program: Symbolic Systems, which currently is authorized by the Faculty Senate to grant bachelor’s and master’s degrees through 2008 (http://symsys.stanford.edu/).

“John Perry and I were running CSLI,” linguist Tom Wasow said, “and John said, ‘You know, we really ought to start up an undergraduate pro-gram.’ I said, ‘Great idea,’ and we contacted peo-ple in computer science, philosophy, psychology and linguistics. We hammered out a curriculum, I wrote the boilerplate text on the reasons for the program, and we got it approved.”

The program, administratively housed in the Linguistics Department, today graduates between 40 and 60 students a year. Beyond occupying some of its space, SymSys affects Linguistics in another way only fitting for an interdisciplinary program. Over the years, Wasow said, because SymSys and Linguistics students take many of the same classes, the far more numerous techies end up driving the debates, and Linguistics has changed as a result.

“SymSys is one of the most successful IDPs [in-terdisciplinary programs],” Wasow said proudly. “It fills a huge gap, because no other program combines fuzzy and techie work like it does. Stu-dents can study both operating systems and how the mind works. It sucks up the best students like a magnet.”

Reeves, the current CSLI director, is the Paul

C. Edwards Professor in the Department of Com-munication. His office is in Wallenberg Hall, with Media X and SCIL, but across campus from Cor-dura Hall. So what does being or not being an in-dependent lab mean?

Above all, he said, the value is practical. The labs administer multidisciplinary research, manage grant money and aren’t bogged down with instruc-tion and hiring decisions like departments are.

However, they are not necessarily physical enti-ties.

“New buildings are overestimated,” he said, though he admits he likes Cordura Hall. “The question is, what level of administration and for-malism is necessary to create interdisciplinarity?” In his view, you need a light rather than a heavy model, you need “stuff you can do, with boots on the ground.” If you’ve got that, then a common building, while nice, is less important.

“But faculty can’t do that on their own,” he added. “So we stake out a middle ground, try to create a hub for a virtual network, which is in-credibly valuable. The lighter you stay, the easier it is for institutions to come and go. If they have their own building, they never go.”

In celebrating CSLI’s existence, Peters and Wa-sow particularly praised its internship program, funded by the university, which pairs undergradu-ates with professors or postdocs over the summer. Bragging on Wasow’s behalf, Peters said he has between three and five SymSys interns a year at the Computational Semantics Laboratory and they’re all wonderful.

For Perry, the independent labs “have to pro-vide people with something they don’t have from their departments, and that varies from depart-ment to department.” Some people need money; that was the case with the philosophers when CSLI started. Others need more space for them-selves; still others need a venue where they can meet with researchers from other fields, which was the case with the people from SRI Interna-tional.

The present-day Wallenberg Hall occupies the last portion of the Quad repaired after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. With a grant from two of the private Swedish Wallenberg foundations, supplemented by the university, the building was

gutted and then equipped with offices and class-rooms. Five of the classrooms are managed by SCIL, though they can be used by anyone who applies; they are showpieces of what technology (both high and low) can do for learning.

In a marriage of genius and common sense, the five “flexible classrooms” allow students with laptops to use their own cursors to get onto big common screens, save their work on a common website, and work collectively on collapsible whiteboards and then photograph their results onto the website. This ability to employ technol-ogy while simultaneously recapturing and nur-turing the collaborative mood of the classroom is emblematic of the mission of SCIL, which was launched as an independent lab in 2002.

The top floor of Wallenberg Hall provides space for some of the more remarkable endeavors of SCIL, CSLI or both.

Chief among them is the Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) project, which in 2004 received a five-year, $25 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). In conjunction with colleagues from the University of Washington and SRI International, researchers here are using technology to, in the words of Roy Pea, co-director of SCIL and a professor at the School of Education, “develop a science of learn-ing.” Reflecting the NSF’s willingness to embrace multi-institutional and multidisciplinary projects, there are five PIs; Pea is one, and one of the re-search “strand leaders” is Reeves.

“We could never have done this without the independent labs,” said Reeves, referring to the fact that the LIFE award was made to SCIL. “It combines neuroscience, anthropology, curriculum development and the humanities, and it’s multi-campus.” LIFE itself has spawned some 30 re-search projects.

Also on Wallenberg’s fourth floor—what Pea called the “mix-it-up space”—is another child of CSLI, Media X, where Reeves wears yet another of his hats. Media X brings together researchers, faculty members, students and industry design-ers to study and develop interactive technology. Among the dozens of projects it has funded since 2002 is one led by Pea called “Science Educa-tion Network of Sensors,” one led by Reeves in-vestigating how computer-supported stories can change people and one led by Wasow on “Learn-ing English via Robust Conversation.” Many of the Media X researchers are affiliated with Sym-bolic Systems; they come from communication, engineering, law, linguistics, medicine, psychol-ogy and education, among other areas (http://me-diax.stanford.edu/).

Media X projects are funded by the industry partners, which at present number around 30 companies worldwide. They establish the fields to be researched, and Media X then issues requests for proposals.

In a way, the organizational mesh of research and development about the interaction of humans and technology is as complex as the object of the study itself. Twenty years ago, no one could have imagined the directions technology would take or how the intimate relations between humans and their inventions would change the way we think and learn. Visionary and audacious researchers at Stanford figured out ahead of time that they needed to be there. They’re still there, changing with the times, both catching up to innovations and leading the way.

Linguistics Professor Tom Wasow is a former director

of the Center for the Study of Language and Information

and co-founder of the Symbolic Systems Program.

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Arthur Bienenstock, dean of research and graduate

policy, oversees the university’s 13 independent labs.

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Extramural Research Administration. The presi-dent’s latest budget request, announced 6 Febru-ary, leaves the NIH below the rate of inflation for research in the coming year.

The NSF did better, however, as Bush prom-ised to double the agency’s budget by 2016. His 2007 request was for $6.02 billion, an increase of 7.9 percent over the previous year. The 2006 budget represented about a 2.4 percent increase over 2005.

Speaking weeks before the 2007 budget request was announced, Jean Feldman, of the NSF’s office of Budget, Finance and Award Management, said she did not expect a qualitative change in funding priorities even if the budget were to remain flat. “A good proposal is a good proposal,” she said, referring to multidisciplinary grants, “but we’ll be able to support less.”

At the same time, the federal government is increasingly reluctant to reimburse universities for certain expenses. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, which cited a study by the Council on Governmental Relations, research universities are losing several million dollars an-nually in unreimbursed costs. Overhead rates are not growing in tandem with research expenses.

“What I see is just more unfunded mandates coming down the line,” Stanford’s Bienenstock told the publication in August.

For Jeff Koseff, a civil and environmental en-gineer whose funding generally comes from the NSF, a shrinking pot is the decisive impediment to multidisciplinary research. Koseff, co-director of the Stanford Institute for the Environment, said the NSF’s centers are sometimes less than what they appear to be, and he expressed optimism that the university to some degree will be able to make up the difference by funding adventurous multi-disciplinary projects on its own.

But there’s a clear limit to what universities can do, he said, and the financial onus must be on the federal government. University presidents “need to get together and make a statement and argue that [multidisciplinary environmental research] is important for the world,” he insisted. Big corpora-tions, if they could be made to see that their long-run interests are at stake (what happens when we run out of air, water and oil, for example?), un-doubtedly would contribute, he said, and if they can be made to play by the same rules as the gov-ernment regarding freedom of research and intel-lectual property, then Koseff sees no problem.

Beyond the question of resources, there are impediments of a more scholarly sort. There is a place for large-scale multidisciplinary research, some scientists say, but there also are drawbacks.

Like a lot of people, not all scientists enjoy working in large groups, at least not all the time. Greenberg at the School of Medicine said that in fact the best research is usually conducted by in-dividuals. “Pound for pound, the School of Medi-cine is the best place in the world for grants,” he said, and most of that money goes to individuals or very small groups.

James Ferrell, a biochemist and chair of the Department of Molecular Pharmacology, also has his doubts, though, like Greenberg, he sees advan-tages on both sides.

“I’m ambivalent about interdisciplinary re-search,” he said. “The upside is that it’s always the case that on the boundaries of different disci-plines and subdisciplines there’s a chance to dis-

cover something that’s really new. When you’re in the middle, you discover incremental things. They’re important, but exciting things happen at interfaces. So the idea that funding agencies might want to encourage this is appealing to me.”

What can get lost, he said, is the intimacy of small-group research and the possibilities it al-lows. A teacher and a couple of postdocs with the same sort of training can easily shift direction, improvise, step around a problem as its contours change. A large interdisciplinary group cannot.

Yet Ferrell buys into multidisciplinary research sufficiently that he recently applied for a large con-sortium grant from the NIH in systems biology.

“My bet is that if we had some people with expert knowledge in multiple disciplines, people who could do computational and experimental bi-ology, that would glue together the discipline and

make us more effective, sort of like someone with an M.D. and a Ph.D.,” said Ferrell, who himself has both degrees. “People who have real expertise in real physical and biological science are a real hope for the future. I don’t really think you need to be a sophisticated biologist in the physical sci-ences. You can train people to do both.”

“Both NIH and NSF are trying to be progres-sive, but it’s hard because nobody’s got a great idea on how to separate a crackpot experiment from a real experiment,” he said. “It’s easy to tell if a project is definitely going to work—that’s incremental science. It’s harder to come up with ways to fund imaginative science.”

(At times, multidisciplinary research at Stan-ford comes to resemble an ensemble performance. McAdams, of Woerner’s team, also works with Ferrell. In October, McAdams won what he ear-lier had described as “a pretty darn big grant”—an $18 million Department of Energy microbiol-ogy award comprising a dozen researchers at six institutions. “Somebody has to take the bull by the horns,” said the former Lockheed physicist, whose grant-writing ability has aided many col-leagues, including his wife, molecular biologist Lucy Shapiro.)

If money and habits can get in the way of changes in research and funding practices, an even greater problem is the disjuncture between categories of knowledge and the structures that literally house those categories.

Rhoten’s study for the NSF, which examined the interactions of researchers at five NSF-funded centers, suggested that physical and intellectual structures are not unrelated. For effective mul-tidisciplinary research to take place, she and her colleagues found, centers cannot be “simple re-configurations designed to attract new funds to old research.” They must be populated by people characterized as “hubs” or as “bridges,” people whose presence enables good research to take place not only because of their knowledge or ability but also because of their connections and attraction.

A virtual community will not do, in other words. A physical one is necessary. And the extent to which that physical community will be rooted in disciplines or not and how many walls will have to be torn down or left standing are among the stickiest quandaries facing the architects of the new multidisciplinarity.

For Byron Reeves, director of Media X and the Center for the Study of Language and Informa-tion, both of which study the interaction of hu-mans and technology, disciplines are the guard-ians of details and they are essential.

“The biggest critique of interdisciplinary work is that people are fast and loose with the details,” he said. Departments and disciplines ensure that researchers do not get sloppy. For that very rea-son, he’s not enthusiastic about the prospect of interdisciplinary appointments.

Koseff, on the other hand, who says he knows no other way of working than in interdisciplinary teams, said that as long as programs and insti-tutes such as his cannot hire faculty, they cannot progress. At present, they receive half-billets that are shared with departments, which then impose conditions. The interdisciplinary centers can ap-point senior fellows, but not tenure-track faculty.

The relevance of this on funding is that the agencies are well aware that while they go about promoting research on the boundaries and in the interstices, the protagonists of that research re-side in departments. If the protagonists are junior faculty, they may be under pressure to produce research that is more confined than they would wish. And regardless of their rank, they may be physically isolated from colleagues in other de-partments with whom they share projects and grant money.

Indeed, if for Koseff billets are the main imped-iment to interdisciplinary research at Stanford, for Greenberg it is physical space. What he called the “centerpieces” of the School of Medicine are four major multidisciplinary programs in search of a home. Private fundraising is under way to ensure that the physicians, lab scientists and computer scientists can truly cohabitate.

“Since the genome revolution, we’ve had a huge need for computer people, for cross-talk,” he said. “The more you can mix people geographically, the better.” And, he added, echoing an assessment in a 2004 National Academy of Sciences study on interdisciplinary research (http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11153.html), “students are the engine that creates interaction among the faculty.” They physically travel from one lab to the next, cross-pollinating, spreading the word, carrying equip-ment and, at least figuratively, breaching walls.

Koseff’s Institute for the Environment also is looking forward to having its own place, in the future Science and Engineering Quad. But, of course, that requires funding. So in the mean-time, he’s keeping busy. “Find a great problem, then find the people and work together,” he said. “That’s it.”

Fundingcontinued from page 3

‘Since the genome revolution,we’ve had a huge need for

computer people, for cross-talk,’ said Greenberg

of the Medical School.

themselves by submitting collaborative proposals, each one a subset of one large project, each one with its own prin-cipal investigator and budget.

“The NSF will have a far easier road than the NIH because we’ve already solved a lot of these problems,” said Hahn’s counterpart at the NSF, Jean Feld-man. “And we’ll continue down that road.” What the agency now calls sub-principal investigators or co-principal investigators will become multiple principal investiga-tors, for example. “But in terms of sub-stance and in terms of how it allows us to

support multidisciplinary research, we’re already doing a lot.”

One Stanford researcher who fully agrees with Feldman is Jeff Koseff, a professor of civil and environmental engi-neering, director of the Stanford Institute for the Environment, and longtime cham-pion and protagonist of interdisciplinary scientific research.

“The NSF has made it very easy,” he said. “I’ve got to hand it to them.”

Senior Associate Dean Eleanor Anton-akos, also at the Engineering School, explained that adjusting a grant’s man-agement to the facts of divided research responsibility is not difficult. The lump

sum is divided into subcontracts, with credit apportioned to each one. If one subcontractor fails to deliver the goods, the corresponding department pays the price. The NSF, meanwhile, stays out of the way.

The obvious problem, Antonakos pointed out, is that making departments ultimately responsible for what is sup-posed to be interdisciplinary in some way undermines the whole point. But bureaucratic adjustments can move only so quickly.

“The nature of science has changed,” the NIH’s Hahn said. “It’s time for us to catch up.”

Investigatorcontinued from page 3

‘The NSF has made it very easy. I’ve got to

hand it to them,’ Koseff said.

inter action

12 WINTER 2006

Feminist Studies: ‘Making connections’

A few years ago, when the femi-nist studies major was coming up for its periodic renewal, someone in a position of au-thority asked the program’s director why Stanford even needed such a thing. Why feminist studies? Why an in-

terdisciplinary program at all?The program’s founder, historian Estelle Freed-

man, was not present at that conversation, but she has an answer.

“Look at the world,” said Freedman, the Edgar E. Robinson Professor in United States History. “Read the newspaper through the lens of gender. It’s everywhere. Internationally, look at Iraq, look at rape, look at birth control. Domestically, the hot political issues of the day are gay marriage and abortion. Students, no matter what they end up doing in life, have to be educated.”

“We wanted to be on the edge, we wanted to apply a critical, analytical perspective and explore everything through the lens of feminism,” she added, referring to the program’s foundations.

What is called the Program in Feminist Studies at Stanford may be called something else at other universities. Some of the women’s studies pro-grams dating back to the 1970s have changed their names in recent years, usually adding “gender.”

Program Director Penny Eckert, a linguist, is proud of the name here. “Feminism implies cri-tique,” she says. “Gender implies a more agnostic approach.”

It also implies crossing disciplines, or at least redefining them. For Myra Strober, a labor econo-mist and a founding director of Stanford’s Insti-tute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWG), feminism is multidisciplinary, not interdisciplin-ary. In her mind, there are very few feminist scholars today whose work truly is interdisciplin-ary, integrating elements and theories of various fields to create something entirely new and auton-omous. Interdisciplinarity will only happen, she said, when there is a critical mass of doctoral pro-grams in women’s studies or feminist studies.

“That’s an enormous undertaking, and it’s re-ally critical that it happen,” she said.

In earlier years, the Feminist Studies Program at Stanford, like other Interdisciplinary Programs (IDPs), was subjected to the criticism that it was not sufficiently rigorous, that it was not real schol-arship.

In reply, Eckert points to the quality of the pro-gram’s students and teachers.

“Feminism is not simply a movement that hap-pened and it’s over,” she said last fall, speaking after a yearlong sabbatical, during which time the directorship was taken over by Andrea Lunsford, a professor of English and director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric. “It’s a continuing, evolv-ing, philosophical and analytical tradition. You

can’t do that within a single major.”One of Eckert’s favorite examples of great fem-

inist scholarship is a path-breaking article that appeared in 1991 in Signs, the pioneering femi-nist journal, which was edited at Stanford’s Cen-ter for Research on Women (IRWG’s predecessor) in the 1980s. “The Egg and the Sperm: How Sci-ence Has Constructed a Romance Based on Ste-reotypical Male-Female Roles” was a study of the language and narrative of reproductive biology. Assumptions of gender roles turn out not only to have influenced the way in which reproduction was described (female processes are wasteful and passive, male processes are energetic and produc-tive) but to have missed much of the complexity of what actually goes on inside men’s and women’s bodies. It is the reproduction, as it were, of gender stereotypes at the cellular level.

A study like that, Eckert said, could not take place in a traditional biology department—though it might well take place in the Program in Human Biology, one of Stanford’s other IDPs. Perhaps not coincidentally, a sizeable number of students in feminist studies classes come from the Human Bi-ology Program, Freedman noted.

A similar example was offered by Strober: “Feminist economics,” she said, has to be more than studying, say, women and the labor market, or women and day care, or women and salaries. Breaking through, creating that autonomous field, seemed impossible to Strober, whose disciplinary training was deeply rooted in economics. One day, however, she came across a paper by another economist, Julie Nelson, who seemed to have pulled it off. It turned out Nelson had graduate degrees in both economics and feminist studies. “So she didn’t have blinders, she could think back and forth,” Strober explained. She could become interdisciplinary.

Freedman, who has taught the Feminist Stud-ies Program core course for years, asks students at the end of each quarter to fill out a questionnaire. Among other things, they are asked to complete the sentence, “What I learned in this class was….” Every year it’s the same, she said. Students learn that feminism is not just one thing.

“We claim the label of ‘feminist studies,’ but we define it very broadly,” she insisted. “This program has always been about making connec-tions.”

The blurb of Freedman’s most recent book, No Turning Back (Ballantine 2002), a history of fem-inism, refers to it as an “interdisciplinary book.”

“I became interdisciplinary as a result of be-ing a feminist,” she said. The book relies upon a wide range of disciplines that she became famil-iar with through her teaching assistants and from colleagues at IRWG, with which the Program in Feminist Studies shares a home in Serra House. Indeed, Lunsford said one of the most exciting parts of being program director for a year was her

regular meetings with IRWG’s graduate fellows, who hail from a variety of disciplines.

“Some people complain feminism is ‘just poli-tics,’” Freedman said. “Well, so is democracy. We’re part of humanity, of humanism. All knowl-edge is political. We represent an analytical ap-proach, and we won’t deny our connection to politics.”

“But,” she said, “there is no political test in our program. Everyone who wants to teach, can.”

It takes a particularly strong commitment for faculty and students to become involved with the Feminist Studies Program.

Students majoring in feminist studies are re-quired to take an introductory class, Feminist Studies 101, seminars in methods and theory, and a “practicum,” which amounts to an internship plus a follow-up senior seminar. Students have served as interns with non-governmental organi-zations, at the U.S. Department of Labor, in class-rooms and hospitals, and with the Feminist Ma-jority Foundation, to name a few.

All classes except 101 and the practicum are cross-listed in the Feminist Studies Program and another department. One problem Eckert pointed to is that no core faculty member’s department is willing to cross-list the practicum because stu-dents in the course are, by definition, feminist studies majors, not majors in the instructor’s home department. So the program has recruited a succession of instructors, who may be excellent but are not tenure-track faculty.

“We need more dedicated faculty lines,” Freed-man said. “There need to be rewards for faculty who teach in IDPs,” she added, “some kind of course credit for starting an IDP course, or sum-mer money, or something.”

It’s a small program, of course—there were 16 graduates in 2002, 17 in 2003, and around 20 majors now—but it is steady and popular. Some 1,000 students a year take feminist studies courses, including repeats.

Students come motivated for different reasons, and it’s often hard to pin down where the interest comes from. Often it’s a particular instructor or teaching assistant who draws them in. Freedman remembered a couple of years in the 1990s when a sorority member was a major, and as a result the classes suddenly were full of her sorority sisters. One year a Stanford Dolly showed up. She liked it.

Back in 1981, when the Feminist Studies Pro-gram started at Stanford, there were students whose parents would not allow them to be ma-jors, Freedman remembered. That doesn’t tend to happen anymore. Today, many students were raised by feminists, both male and female. That might make members of the faculty feel old, but it also shows that good ideas eventually, especially with the help of good university programs such as Feminist Studies, change the way we live our lives.

From left: Historian Estelle Freedman was a founder of Feminist Stud-

ies; English Professor Andrea Lunsford served as director during the

2004-05 academic year; linguist Penny Eckert is the current director.

P H O T O S B Y L . A . C I C E R O

‘Feminism implies critique,’ Eckert said.

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