Dean's Message, Summer 2004
Dear friends of the college,
In the last several months, many students, faculty, staff and visitors have remarked about the amount of construction on campus. For some, the feeling of the campus was summed up by John Romano, the Vice Provost and Dean of Admissions, who said as he and I walked last fall along a torn-up Pollock Road, "This isn't a university, it's a construction site." The very good news is, of course, that the large amount of construction reflects a vigorous institution and an investment in Penn State's future.
The construction projects on campus include several buildings and a number of projects to enhance the appearance and function of the central campus, including parking and traffic flow. Naturally, we focus on the buildings that most directly affect our college, the Chemistry and Life Science Buildings. These buildings, which connect to each other by reaching out over Shortlidge Road, form a new gateway to science.
After years of planning and construction, the buildings are now nearing completion. We are delighted that the Department of Chemistry will soon begin moving into its new home and that the Life Sciences Building is scheduled to be completed by the end of the summer. The Life Sciences Building is a shared building managed by the Huck Institutes for the Life Sciences. It will provide modern classroom space for use by the whole campus, and it will bring together faculty and students from the Eberly College of Science, the College of Agriculture, and other colleges.
The new buildings will enable and support continued growth in the level of activity in the college and in the quality of our educational and research programs. They are another step as we move toward becoming widely recognized as one of the premier centers of education and research in the basic sciences.
The basic sciences are indeed flourishing at Penn State. For example, a few weeks ago Eun-Seong Kim, a graduate student in Physics, and Moses Chan, Evan Pugh Professor of Physics, announced a stunning new result in the journal Nature. They described the likely discovery of a new state of solid matter—a supersolid. They gathered rather direct evidence that, under the right conditions, solid helium-4 takes on the characteristics of a superfluid. If the discovery is verified in further experiments, it will confirm that all three states of matter can undergo Bose-Einstein condensation, in which particles condense into the same quantum-mechanical state. The existence of superfluids and "supervapors," which are extremely cold collections of atoms in the vapor phase that condense into a superfluid-like state, had previously been proven, but theorists had continued to debate about whether a supersolid was even possible.
The college's central mission is to provide the highest-quality teaching and research in the basic sciences. Another essential part of the mission is to reach out beyond Penn State. A very important way in which the Eberly College of Science reaches out is through the productive use of the discoveries and inventions that come from College research. The feature story in this issue of Science Journal describes several examples of the products and companies that have been developed based on discoveries and inventions made by the students and faculty of our college.
The efforts of the Eberly College of Science and other Penn State colleges in the development and use of intellectual property have resulted in a rapid rise in Penn State's technological strength. According to data analyzed by CHI Research and reported in the December 2003/ January 2004 issue of MIT's Technology Review magazine, Penn State moved from 31st to 14th in the nation between 1997 and 2002, based on the number of patents issued and the number of times they were cited. The United States Patent and Trademark Office ranked Penn State among the top 10 university patent recipients in 2002.
Despite its long history of work in science and engineering, and despite some very notable contributions in decades past, like those made by Russell Marker, this level of activity and attention to intellectual property at Penn State is very recent. Income generated from intellectual property generally follows patenting, licensing, and startups with a significant time lag. In this area, Penn State still has a long way to go. A report from the Association of University Technology Managers ranked Penn State 62nd among U.S. institutions of higher education in fiscal 2002 licensing revenues. The University's intellectual property revenues should rise in time due to the startup activities and levels of patenting and licensing that have greatly increased during the past decade.
I assure you that you will continue to hear about the achievements of our faculty and students as they contribute to this trend, both when you read our college magazine and also through the many other ways you connect with us, including your involvement in our programs and your support for our future.
Sincerely,
Daniel J. Larson
Dean, Eberly College of Science
