Removing Silos

The RDSC’s structure mirrors a core value of CMC’s integrated sciences curricula—the ability to move around in an expansive environment without, both literally and figuratively, hitting boundaries and barriers. No structural silos; no thought silos; no science silos.

The chance to approach science education in an entirely new way is what drew many KDIS teacher-scholars to the department, which is built around three grand challenges—brain, health, and our planet—and grounded in deep engagement with ethics, policy, and economics.

“The way that we’re able to teach has been transformed,” said Jason Keller, KDIS Professor of Ecology. Focusing on the nine state-of-the-art teaching labs, he is especially thrilled about the path-breaking possibilities ahead.

“This is the first time, as a department, we’ve had our own teaching laboratories,” Keller celebrated. “We can now roll out innovative, integrative courses where chemistry and physics are not separate, where chemistry and biology are not separate. And best of all, students get hands-on experience within that integration.”

Seamless transitions between disciplines are facilitated by the proximity of all KDIS faculty—18 now with plans to hire 7 more—on floors two and three of the cantilevered building.

Shibu Yooseph, KDIS Professor of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, emphasized the potency of this arrangement, unique among collegiate science programs.

“It’s different from a traditional department building—we’re all here. From a collaboration perspective, this co-location is huge. Very few places have this level of interdisciplinarity housed in one building,” he said, adding that this helps students learn to connect the dots between fields now, instead of later or not at all.

“For students to understand these connections from the start, that’s going to be a big win for everyone.”

Discoveries on display

This interweaving of disciplines can be seen first-hand in the three “bench” labs for research, each with five benches intended for five faculty with complementary backgrounds. There’s no such thing as a “chem lab,” or a “bio lab”—they are “all-purpose.” Imitating the spaciousness and visibility of the building, a wide range of disciplines and approaches—and breakthroughs—are on display to the benefit of all.

“The fun part is seeing students make discoveries with faculty to better understand what everyone is doing,” said Keller. “Right there, a colleague is doing something very small with pipettors; across the bench, a colleague is 3D printing dinosaur skulls. The scope and scale of what it can mean to do scholarship is literally right across from them.”

Though the RDSC also houses two computational research labs, like every other intention and framework within the building, there’s no containment within the four walls or to one course of study. Training students in computational literacy—in areas such as AI, machine learning, and modeling—is also deeply integrated into multi-disciplinary, problem-based learning in the exciting new facility.

“In our lab courses, there’s no need to make any distinctions between ‘this is a computing lab’ and ‘this is a bench lab,’” said Libeskind-Hadas. “We can, in the same laboratory session, do some bench lab work and then go straight to a comfortable seating area and say, ‘Now open up your computers and let’s start working on our code.’”

Libeskind-Hadas shared an example of how this relationship between methodologies can move science—and CMC students—toward a unified fluency that will uncover innovative solutions to complex problems.

“When one is designing a new model for a drug, rather than trying 100,000 options, you can do computational modeling that will help predict which candidates are the most promising, and that guides the bench lab work,” he explained. “The bench lab scientist is still doing critical experimental work, but rather than searching for needles in a haystack, they’re using computational methods to help identify potential real gems.

“Very few undergraduate science programs require that every undergraduate student gets this kind of computational sophistication. For us, it’s baked right into the cake from day one.”