Advertisement Campus leaders have picked three research themes for the institute: biotechnology, nanotechnology and information technology.
They're planning to place 20 chief scientists — five teams of four professors, each with one faculty member from campus and three recruited from elsewhere — in the coveted space, to open in 2010.
Which teams are picked, and what they will study, will be determined in a competition over the next year, said John Wiley, who is retiring as UW-Madison chancellor and has been named interim director of the public institute.
Faculty can submit initial proposals until Nov. 3. Two dozen or more of those ideas will be selected for further review by Feb. 2; full proposals for those topics will be due April 1. Five teams will be picked by next September, a year before they will begin to move into the building.
The goal is to assemble groups of scientists from a variety of backgrounds who will collaborate in the three research areas, Wiley said.
"We expect there will be a huge response to this," he said. "It will be transformational for this campus."
The research, which could include such projects as developing artificial retinas or creating tiny robots that can be injected into the bloodstream, will have a "human health and welfare punctuation point," said Marsha Mailick Seltzer.
Seltzer, director of the Waisman Center, an interdisciplinary research facility near UW Hospital, has been interim director of the institute during its inception for the past two years.
The applications of the research at the institute may be unexpected, said Wiley, who noted that lasers used for eye surgery today emerged from the world of physics, not ophthalmology.
"Things happening in somebody else's backyard might be important breakthroughs in your area," he said.
The Morgridge Institute
The competition for the public institute comes as organizers of the private part of the building, the Morgridge Institute for Research, are expected to name an executive director soon.
UW-Madison stem-cell pioneer James Thomson has been named director of regenerative biology of the private institute. Other scientific directors will be named for its two other themes: computational biology and bioengineering.
The public and private institutes are known together as the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery. They will be in the same building, funded by $50 million from the state, $50 million from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and $50 million from UW-Madison alumni John and Tashia Morgridge.
When fully staffed, each institute will house 200 or more people, organizers say.
The public institute will feature research funded by government grants. The private institute will accept funding from private foundations and industry and allow scientists to work more closely with drug companies.
The project is separate from the Wisconsin Institutes for Medical Research, a three-tower complex near UW Hospital that will focus on preventing and treating diseases. The first tower of that complex, to cost more than $600 million, will open next week.
WID challenges
The concept behind the public Wisconsin Institute for Discovery is based on the Cluster Hiring Initiative started at UW-Madison a decade ago, Wiley said.
Instead of adding faculty solely by departments, administrators asked the campus to propose clusters of professors in new areas. String theory, religious studies and zebrafish biology are among the 49 clusters that emerged.
For the new institute, some deans and department chairs will be reluctant to give up star faculty, whose federal grants will follow them to the institute, Seltzer acknowledged.
That is one reason only five existing faculty will be tapped for the institute, with the remainder recruited, she said.
The faculty selected to work in the institute will carry out its main mission of interdisciplinary research, but other professors on campus will participate, Wiley said.
They will include lawyers, political scientists, philosophers and ethicists, who will help debate the potential effects of the new technologies such as the challenges of removing super-small nanoparticles from the environment.
"Nothing that has promise doesn't also carry risk," Wiley said. "We're going to have to be especially careful about how we roll out these technologies."
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