ByGeorge!

January 2006

Research at GW

BY PRESIDENT STEPHEN JOEL TRACTHENBERG

We’ve come a long way. When this institution first opened its doors in 1821, its mission was to train young Baptist men (women were out of the question) to be ministers and missionaries. In nearly two centuries, GW has had different identities and different homes, trying different approaches and often trying to keep its head above water. All that is past.

Today, GW is a major research University and, I am quite sure, will continue to be so in the future. I was moved to think about this fact and to write about it because of one especially happy piece of news. On Nov. 1, the Department of Transportation fully reinstated its funding for our National Crash Analysis Center at our Loudoun campus. This action means we will move forward with this $12.1 million project, focusing on transportation safety and security. In collaboration with our government and corporate partners, GW researchers will substantially advance automotive safety and security by imagining and then creating technologies that will save lives and, not incidentally, spur economic development.

I hasten to add that this is just one component of the research enterprise at GW. From 1997 to 2005, our annual research expenditures rose from $60 million to more than $120 million, an increase that reflects both the skill of our researchers and the confidence in them of those giving grants.

The scope of GW research has increased considerably, with strong programs in all our schools and colleges. Forgive me if I leave some out, but some of the most important and promising areas of research at GW are in biomedical engineering, biostatistics, global health studies, health and public policy studies, intellectual property law, nuclear physics, prevention and community health, and proteomics, which is the study of genetics that refers to all the proteins in a genome and is considered by many “the next step” in genetic research.

Research, despite what some may think, is not removed from teaching. Our students benefit by studying with leading researchers: they are exposed to the kind of novel and breakthrough research that has yet to find its way into textbooks. Moreover, our students have opportunities to see what the future of their fields will be and even to make research contributions themselves.

Research here and at other universities plays a major role in the expansion of the American economy and the enhancement of human knowledge. The great Eureka! moments of discovery — especially in medicine, science, and engineering — are nearly always proclaimed on university campuses. The grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, like our grant from the Department of Transportation, enable university researchers to make the discoveries that make a new medicine possible, build a better bridge, or make cars safer, among many other things. They also, naturally, inspire new businesses. Think of Google, which was born at Stanford. In the same way, GW investigators are beginning to play a bigger and bigger role in fostering economic expansion with recent patents and licenses. Two particularly interesting areas are in computer technologies and in nano-technologies — research that deals in objects only one-billionth of a meter in diameter. Sometimes thinking small can turn into big things like improved computer storage, biotechnology for therapeutic use, and semi-conductors. We shall see — right here at GW.

That’s only some of what we are doing. Fostering the research enterprise at GW is, and will remain, one of our most important goals. By doing so, we improve teaching, we advance knowledge, we add to the health of the nation’s economy. And, of course, we learn more and more about the world around us, how it works, and how to make sense of it — which, to me, seems the most important goal of a great university.


Send feedback to: bygeorge@gwu.edu

 

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