The University has chosen architect Jose Rafael Moneo to design a joint neuroscience and psychology complex that will displace the parking lot at the southeast corner of Poe Field.
The 200,000 sq. ft. headquarters for the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and the Department of Psychology will house state-of-the-art labs, faculty offices and classrooms, and is meant to push the University to the forefront of neuroscience and behavioral science research.
Administrators declined to comment on the project's estimated cost or prospective donors.
New complex yet to be designed
President Tilghman's advisory committee on architecture recommended Moneo, who heads the Madrid-based firm Jose Rafael Moneo Arquitecto, for his experience in designing laboratory buildings and his skill at "building projects within a context," University Executive Vice President Mark Burstein said.
Moneo won the Pritzker Architecture Prize — the most prestigious award in the field — in 1996. His background in education also set him apart. Formerly chair of the architecture department at Harvard, Moneo was also a visiting professor at Princeton in 1992.
Burstein described Moneo's style as "well-detailed, very thoughtful — a clean, modern approach to architecture."
The design of the neuroscience/psychology complex is still in its most preliminary stage. University Vice President and Secretary Bob Durkee '69 said serious planning will begin in October.
The three-acre site at Lot 20, which will be divided among buildings, parking spaces and landscaping features, poses several challenges.
The buildings will be visible from Washington Road, especially in the winter, and must present an inviting face to campus visitors, Durkee said.
The site also borders wooded areas and lies in the path of stormwater flow into Lake Carnegie, requiring a sustainable design that minimizes the impact of the complex on the natural environment.
Faculty plans 'revolutionary' research
University neuroscientists — a group that includes biologists, physicists, mathematicians and psychologists — expect that research in the new buildings will lead to a fundamental understanding of neural networks and the human brain.
The brain is "the most complex device in the known universe — comprised of 100 billion neurons in our heads, each with 1,000 connections to other neurons for a total of 100 trillion connections, or synapses," psychology professor Jonathan Cohen, a co-director of the neuroscience institute, said.
"That's a phenomenal number of interactions, the dynamics of which are almost beyond our capacity to imagine," he added.
Fathoming the workings of the mind demands extensive lab space, costly equipment and novel research approaches.
The new neuroscience building will include three basic types of facilities: research labs, teaching facilities and "shared-use facilities like brain scanners and computers and expensive microscopes," Cohen said.
"The lab facilities will range from traditional neurophysiological setups where one is recording the activity of single neurons to brain imaging scanners that map brain activity on a macroscopic level," he added.
Green Hall currently houses a four-ton, $1.8 million functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, which gives scientists the ability to "see what's happening in the brain while people are engaging in all sorts of behaviors," psychology chair Deborah Prentice explained. The scanner, billed as "the ultimate brain machine," will be moved to the new neuroscience/psychology complex.
The University will purchase additional scanners for the complex, some of which will be able to image the brains of small mammals.
Molecular biology professor David Tank, a co-director of the neuroscience institute, said that "the basic properties of neural circuits" in less complex organisms reveal "common principles" that also apply to the human brain.
"We hope to emphasize the use of genetic model organisms: the fly, the mouse, the zebrafish and C. elegans [a roundworm species]," Tank said.
University neuroscientists have already made significant discoveries on the function of relatively simple neural systems in organisms such as goldfish and salamanders.
Charting a new course
Since the University cannot replicate the breadth of neuroscience research at medical schools, it will target its efforts at relatively new and unexplored subsets of the field.
Faculty will concentrate on the action of neural systems rather than the function of single brain cells.
"The last 30 to 40 years of neuroscience research has been focused on the individual neurons," Tank said.
Systems neuroscience, on the other hand, explores how the collective activity of a network of neurons translates into thought or action. Under the umbrella of systems neuroscience, faculty will investigate how neurons process information (neural coding) and how their activity patterns change with time (neural dynamics).
The University also plans to emphasize the use of mathematical and theoretical models, as well as computer simulations.
"Typically, the results of neuroscience research have been expressed in English," Cohen said. "Our goal is to promote mathematical and quantitative rigor more than has been the case in the field."
Such research could "revolutionize neuroscience the way mapping the human genome revolutionized genomics," he added.
University neuroscientists are optimistic that their work will provide a foundation for others to make advances in fields such as medicine, computer science, economics and philosophy.
"Our focus is not going to be on how a disturbance in a neuron or a brain causes Alzheimer's or schizophrenia, but rather on how a healthy neuron or a brain functions," Cohen said.
"Being able to figure those [medical] questions out depends heavily on being able to understand how the brain works on a fundamental level," he added.
Moving to the 'science neighborhood'
Tank described the location of the neuroscience/psychology complex as ideal, given its proximity to Carl Icahn Laboratory and Jadwin Hall, which house the complementary fields of genomics and physics.
The complex itself will accommodate both the psychology department and the neuroscience institute, either in separate wings of the same building or in two distinct but connected buildings.
"Physical proximity really breeds collaboration and community," Cohen said.
He added that while interdisciplinary work already occurs among faculty interested in neuroscience, distance remains an obstacle, "as crude and pedestrian as that sounds."
The psychology department will vacate Green Hall when the new neuroscience and psychology buildings are completed.
"We're not moving because our current facilities are outdated or outmoded — in fact, they were just renovated a few years ago," Prentice said.
"Ten of our colleagues who are neuroscientists will be moving," Prentice said. The psychology department will follow to maintain a unified faculty and to take advantage of the technology in the new complex.
Unlike the neuroscience institute, which will undergo a major expansion in its new location, the psychology department "will maintain the same size," she added.
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