University Communications

UCLA is not stopping with the programs it has already established, and recently the university submitted applications for two more IGERT grants, one of them for a program in the social sciences, says Vice Chancellor for Research Roberto Peccei.

“We are not going to be shy about it,” he says. “Because they fit so well with our institutional profile, we are likely to go after more in the future, and we hope that the NSF will keep this program alive.”

The fit is so natural, Peccei says, that if the NSF had not come up with the IGERT concept, UCLA might have invented it itself. In addition, the grants provide necessary support for graduate students who might otherwise have a difficult time finding support because their work crosses disciplinary boundaries.

“By having the program this way, it makes the schools want to cooperate with each other because the federal government is putting money into it,” Peccei says. “It’s a very significant, beneficial push for our cross-disciplinary graduate education.”

TO ILLUSTRATE WHY these new interdisciplinary sciences have so easily taken root on campus, Professor of Physiological Science and Neurology Allan Tobin simply steps outside his office in the Gonda (Goldschmied) Center for Neuroscience and Genetic Research. A short stroll away is another complex of labs, offices and classrooms for the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, Tobin’s partner in the NeuroEngineering Training Program, which was the first IGERT established at UCLA, in 1999. Connected to that complex is the Math Sciences Building. In fact, within a five-minute walk to the Court of Sciences are located the labs of molecular biologists, physicists, chemists, biochemists, computer scientists and health-science researchers, among many others. A culture of collaboration has evolved within this dense concentration of scientists, a culture in which researchers from the Geffen School of Medicine work alongside colleagues from the College of Letters and Science, the engineering and dental schools.

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