Provost Carolyn Dever is pushing for faculty members across disciplines to send in a second round of proposals for the College’s Cluster Initiative — a program allowing faculty to form groups with the aim of solving complex issues of global importance. Dever sent out her request last Thursday, and proposals are due on Feb. 16.
“Each faculty cluster will focus on a topic of great urgency to the world — the most pressing social issues, the most significant scholarly challenges of our time,” Dever said in an email. “On what world questions is Dartmouth poised to have the greatest impact? Our faculty knows our areas of greatest existing strength and how to convert that strength to world leadership through the strategic investment of a faculty cluster.”
Final decisions for funding these proposals will be made by late April. Applications for the first round of proposals closed in March 2014. The six clusters from this first round are already in the planning stages.
Of the initial 30 proposals from the first round, the six selected clusters are the “William H. Neukom Academic Cluster in Computational Science,” “Breaking the Neural Code,” “Ice, Climate and Energy,” “Health Care Delivery Science,” “the Economics and Politics of Globalization” and “Sustainability Science and Governance.”
The clusters are part of College President Phil Hanlon’s push to increase the size and diversity of the faculty, since each cluster will hire additional professors with expertise in the pertinent area.
Vice provost for academic initiatives Denise Anthony said that in order to take on these global challenges and complex issues, there is a need to bring together teams from very different fields to think about the issue.
“It’s not even just that we need more faculty to do that,” Anthony said. “It’s building on areas where Dartmouth already has some strength. We have some of the leading thinkers — some of the most creative scholars already working on these issues — and what we want to do is build in that area.”
Dean of the Thayer School of Engineering Joseph Helble said in an email that faculty members come together based on their own individual interests and expertise to identify a proposed topic. This proposal is then reviewed by Dever and deans from the Arts and Sciences, the Geisel School of Medicine, Thayer, the Tuck School of Business and graduate studies programs.
“The academic deans may sometimes discuss the initial ideas with members of the faculty, and can also help identify resources that would be needed to help support a cluster proposal,” he said. “But the scholarly focus of the clusters — the academic ideas themselves — generally originate with members of the faculty.”
Thayer engineering professor Laura Ray, who is also taking part in the William H. Neukom Academic Cluster in Computational Science, said that the cluster is still in the developmental stages. It is currently in the search phase of hiring three new members from outside Dartmouth, including a cluster leader who will hold the title of the Thomas E. Kurtz chair in computational science. The Kurtz chair will hire the other two new cluster members.
The cluster will integrate and extend the computational work that is currently happening at the College, Neukom Institute for Computational Sciences director Dan Rockmore said in a previous interview with The Dartmouth.
Interdisciplinary in nature, computational science focuses on data analysis across various academic fields, ranging from physics to anthropology, and uses mathematical models to solve scientific problems.
Currently, the search team is comprised of seven faculty members from across campus, Ray said. She said she hopes to find a suitable candidate by the end of the academic year, although the member will not become active until July 1.
Ray said that the Kurtz chair faculty member will further define the vision for the cluster. She said that since the College is already well-known for its success in computational science, the cluster could bring “the best minds to Dartmouth to work on these important problems” and bring about future changes.
“There was a time when nobody even knew what a computer should look like, and I personally feel like we are somehow on the verge of some other exciting time where the development of computational principles and resources, even like hardware, will enable discovery and development of all sorts of new things, new medicines, new materials,” she said.
She said that Dever’s decision to accept second-round proposals is a terrific way for the College to move forward.
“A new goal is to identify another set [of proposals] where we will do the same thing,” Anthony said. “The idea is that we are moving forward with multiple kinds of questions and areas where we want to grow the faculty and not necessarily say, ‘We’ll only proceed with that once we accomplish this.’”
She said that the second round call does not have a quota on accepted proposals, although Dever will accept about five, in addition to the six in the planning stages.
Professors from other clusters did not respond to request for comment by press time.
