Howard Hughes Names First Seven Group Leaders for Janelia Farm. (July 8, 2005)

   The first seven group leaders have been recruited by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's (HHMI) Janelia Farm, a US$500 (A$678) million research campus set to open in mid-2006 in Ashburn, Virginia.

Although the Howard Hughes Medical Institute was established in 1953 and has given billions for medical research, Janelia Farm is its first "freestanding campus". It is situated a few kilometres from Washington, D.C. According to HHMI the development of the Janelia Farm Research Campus (JFRC) began toward the end of 1999 because the Institute believed that certain types of research were not well supported by current mechanisms and "HHMI with its resources, flexibility, and willingness to invest in challenging, long-term projects and atypical research environments [could] have a major impact in filling this gap." It was until the end of 2004 that the initial areas of research were laid down. Two research areas were identified as being particularly well matched to the JFRC environment: "the identification of general principles that govern how information is processed by neuronal circuits, using genetic model systems in conjunction with imaging, electrophysiological, and computational methods; and the development of imaging technologies and computational methods for image analysis."

When fully operational, JFRC will have 24 group leaders and about 300 scientists on staff. The first seven named in HHMI's June 29 announcement are:

• Dmitri Chklovskii, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York

• Sean Eddy, Washington University in St. Louis

• Nikolaus Grigorieff, Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass.

• Eugene Myers, University of California at Berkeley

• Julie Simpson, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Roland Strauss, University of Würzburg in Germany

According to HHMI, Janelia Farm will be fully funded by HHMI and no external grants will be permitted. Recruited staff will in fact be required to terminate their research grants before taking up a position at JFRC. The stated object of HHMI is that "Janelia Farm is to free scientists from the need to write grant proposals and to allow them the freedom to change research direction without concern for the impact on their funding. HHMI plans to provide all the resources needed for research carried out at Janelia Farm."

Present plans call for occupancy to begin in the second quarter of 2006.