The private sector of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery — the Morgridge Institute for Research — announced a team of University of Wisconsin researchers who will lead a series of focus areas.
“The institute’s main mission is to accelerate discovery to delivery to impact human health through research by an entire chain of scientists,” Executive Director for the Morgridge Institute for Research Sangtae Kim said.
Kim added even though one of UW’s great strengths is fundamental scientific research, the process of implementing the results of a scientific discovery into public health sectors is too long.
This new, recruited team of interdisciplinary researchers will work together to mend this disconnect and to increase the speed at which society can benefit from scientific breakthroughs, Kim said.
The team, who will also eventually recruit other talented researchers from around the world, consists of anatomy professor James Thomson, plant pathology professor Paul Ahlquist, medical physics professor Thomas Mackie, senior scientist at the UW Wisconsin Center for Educational Research Susan Millar, computer sciences professor Miron Livny, biochemistry fellow Nirupama Shevde and Kim.
Together, the members selected the institute’s research focus areas, which include regenerative biology, virology, medical devices, pharmaceutical informatics, education research and outreach experiences, such as hands-on science experiments in teaching labs.
The institute employed researchers from differing fields of study because the greatest challenge facing human health today lies in that all the answers cannot be found in a single discipline, Kim said.
Instead, more and more problems within the medical field have begun to arise which require an interdisciplinary resolution, Livny said.
“The complexity and size of the problems demand people of multiple disciplines, such as biology or engineering, work together to attack these dilemmas,” Livny said.
Only the combined knowledge of many scholars who are highly educated in their fields will allow the global community to discover the ultimate solutions to all human health crises, Kim said.
These researchers will attempt to discover these answers by conducting experiments at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery building, whose completion date is set for Dec. 2010, alongside scientists from the public Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, which will also be housed in the building.
Even though the Morgridge Institute will share a building with the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, the two institutions consist of completely different focus areas and governance structures, Kim said.
As a private, non-profit organization, the Morgridge Institute is completely independent from the UW Board of Regents and has its own board of trustees and executive director, Kim said.
“Being a private organization gives us the advantage of greater flexibility and speed in responding to opportunities in the biomedical field,” Kim said.
Unlike the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, whose broad fields of research are nanotechnology, biological technology and informational technology, the Morgridge Institute limits its exploration solely to interdisciplinary medical research.
“Since the two institutions have such different functions and focuses, it will be interesting and exciting to see how they interact in the future,” Kim said.
