Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery
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The Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery (WID) is an interdisciplinary research center located at the 1300 block of University Avenue on the University of Wisconsin campus. Opened in December 2010, it is composed of the public Wisconsin Institute for Discovery and private Morgridge Institute for Research.
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Formation
Though WID was initially announced in 2004 by Governor Jim Doyle, its creation was made a reality in 2006 when John and Tashia Morgridge, two UW alumni, pledged $50 million to create the private half of the building. The state then matched that amount, while the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation provided a one-time gift of $110 million.
Structure
After the structure's announcement, planning began for the format of the building and the research teams that would call it home. To facilitate the interdisciplinary approach WID is meant to foster in its scientists, the building will include features such as a "town hall" area and other common meeting rooms and spaces that will make chance encounters an everyday occurrence. Through these chance encounters, it is hoped researchers will bounce ideas off one another, leading to discoveries only a unique range of minds together could produce. The town hall will also be open to members of the general public.
Above the town hall, which is located on the first floor, floors two, three and four will house research areas. These areas are divided into three "research pods." On each floor there is a pod for the private and public sectors of the building and another for interdisciplinary aspects of research.
Each part of the building is being constructed with the idea of flexibility in mind, which will allow spaces to be adapted to a wide variety of research purposes.
The building is also being constructed with LEED standards in mind. It will be powered by geothermal energy.
Wisconsin Institute for Discovery
In 2008, former UW Chancellor John Wiley was announced as the interim director for the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. Holding a strong background in science and research, Wiley has since overseen the development of the institute. As the public portion of WID, the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery is overseen by UW. In the summer of 2009, the institute announced five faculty projects chosen to be housed at WID:
- Polymer Bio-Nanocomposite Scaffolds for Tissue Engineering (Lih-Sheng “Tom” Turng): a crossing of biotechnology and nanotechnology meant to develop and produce on a mass scale structures to aid in replacing damaged or missing tissue.
- Epigenetics (John Denu): focusing on addressing challenges faced in studying gene expression mechanisms.
- Living Environments Laboratory (Patricia Flatley Brennan): working toward advancement of technologies that will bring health care into the home instead of hospital.
- Optimization in Biology and Medicine (Michael Ferris): a wide-ranging research area that will focus on areas such as improving tumor treatments and improving imaging tools.
- Systems Biology (John Yin): working toward the advancement of models that show how different organisms interact and how they fare in different environmental settings.
Morgridge Institute for Research
In early 2008, it was announced famed stem cells researcher James Thomson would be the inaugural member of the research team of the private half of WID--the Morgridge Institute for Research. As a private entity, the Morgridge Institute is governed by a board of directors instead of UW. However, the center's research is still based around the strengths of UW, and will focus on five areas:
- Regenerative biology (James Thomson): creating cells to better understand human body, working toward prevention/treatment of degenerative diseases, developing drug treatments.
- Virology (Paul Ahlquist): working toward better understanding, prevention and treatment of viruses; improving understanding of healthy cells and tissue; applying knowledge from viruses to other fields of research.
- Medical devices (Thomas “Rock” Mackie): studying medical problems and their relation to medical devices, improving medical devices, applying medical devices to the clinic in a better way.
- Pharmaceutical informatics (Sangtae "Sang" Kim): working on computational chemistry and biology research projects, developing compounds to apply to disease models, applying petascale computational chemistry to widening the chemical library, producing economic strategies to unite universities and industries.
- Education research (Susan Millar): making game-based and simulation-based resources available to the biomedical and health sciences community in order to improve public understanding
External links
Notable articles
- Some lawmakers concerned with WID
- WID in-depth
- Thomson joins MIR
- Wiley to lead WID
- WID on track for 2010 completion
- Geothermal energy to heat institutes
- Morgridge team announced
