BICOEE Brain Imaging Center of Economic Excellence

Role of the BICOEE

• Removing Obstacles to Collaboration:
  The first key role of the ICOE director is to enable collaborators to overcome obstacles. The most obvious obstacle is the physical distances between the two schools. The high-tech nature of the work of the BICOEE is such that the vast majority of collaboration can easily take place by telephone and internet. A further, perhaps more important obstacle to collaboration between different institutions is the administrative difficulties of transferring funds, differences in hiring practices etc. A major source of delay, frustration and failure in the early stages of collaborations is the process of learning how to interface two different administrative systems. The two directors (at USC and MUSC) have themselves overcome this set of obstacles, and will act as a clearinghouse of expertise so that all future collaborations will not have to "reinvent the wheel" each time. Dr. Gordon Baylis (USC) and Dr. Mark George (MUSC) have a funded grant to perform brain imaging in young adults with attention-deficit disorder (ADHD). Subjects are recruited at USC in Columbia and studied there in the advanced High Density EEG/ERP electrophysiology facility. They then travel to MUSC and have their brain's scanned on the new 3 Tesla MRI research scanner, while they are performing the same tasks as they did at USC. Drs. Baylis and George have joint appointments at the other institutions, and they have also recently written a federal NIH grant to use high-tech brain scanning (MUSC) combined with novel image analysis (USC) to understand and predict better who will recover from a stroke. Similarly collaborations exist between Dr. Barkley at MUSC and Dr. Smith at USC, who have recently submitted a joint grant proposal to NIH on diagnostic aspects of ADHD.

  These examples show the feasibility of research collaboration, by the existence of a nascent group. The lottery monies would allow these early steps to mature and become more stable. In today's world much of the legwork of research can be done at a distance, using the excellent and improving internet connections between USC and MUSC. However, more help in overcoming the problems of distance will be provided by the BICOEE being physically present at both universities, providing office space for post-doctoral staff and key BICOEE faculty when they are working at the other institution.

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• Encouragement of Collaborations and Funds for Research Training:
  In order to ensure that the research stays cutting edge, constant human interaction is needed to keep ideas and innovation moving between the locations. This means that to really make a BICOEE work, there needs to be a constant flow of people moving between the universities, and industry. Although initially this component will be modest, and funded from the Lottery Endowment, as soon as the principle has been proven (after 2-3 years), we will seek training funds from the NIH to expand this program. The initial rationale for these training programs is to ensure the vitality of the collaboration between USC and MUSC. Similar inter-institutional research and training centers have proved very successful in other contexts - for example the Center for the Neural Basis for Cognition in Pittsburgh is a collaboration of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. However, an important bi-product for South Carolina is the production of a large number of trained doctoral and post-doctoral scientists living in the State. These scientists are an important resource for the scientific positions within knowledge-based industries in other university centers. The community of young and highly trained scientists is a crucial for creating the startup companies that will surround the research core.

  We propose to strongly encourage collaboration by subsidizing it, while at the same time requiring investigators to show their support for the collaboration in a concrete way. To achieve this balance we use the time-honored technique of matching funds.

  1. Matching funds for cross-training postdoctoral fellows:
     Each year the Center would fund half of two post-docs (the other half from grants held by investigators at either institution), with the proviso that the postdoctoral researcher works in the opposite institution.
  2. Matching funds for Graduate Students:
     This idea is the same as above, but would encourage graduate students in BICOEE related disciplines to spend time at the sister site.
  3. Undergraduate Research Experience:
     This would be a fund for a few undergraduate students at other SC colleges and universities to visit either site of the BICOEE. These funds would help grow the local talent and interest that would be needed for SC to develop a brain imaging and biomedical applications cluster.