Several new initiatives are moving forward as part of this university’s collaborative program with its Baltimore counterpart.
MPowering the State, this university’s shared academic and research effort with the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and other companies and organizations, is pushing ahead on a collaborative public health school and a revamped scientific research institute.
“This is a really big impact,” university President Wallace Loh said. “To make major leaps at the University of Maryland, you have to have a partner. These things are so expensive that we just don’t have the money to do it ourselves.”
As part of MPowering, this university’s “broad-based, traditional” public health school will be integrated with a narrower master’s program in Baltimore, said Ann Wylie, assistant to the president and former provost.
Plans for the collaborative public health school have not been completed, but Wylie said the campuses would be working together to offer each school’s students courses to which they currently do not have access.
Wylie, a member of MPowering’s steering committee, said students would not be expected to migrate between the two campuses in order to take advantage of the public health collaboration. Rather, the campuses would make mutual offerings that students could use without traveling.
Patrick O’Shea, this university’s chief research officer, said the collaborative school would make financial applications for the two schools simpler.
“A lot of funding agencies treat us as two separate institutions,” O’Shea said, which thickens the application
said, which thickens the application bureaucracy and can pit this university and UMB against each other when each school applies for grants.
“We’ve worked very hard to streamline that relationship,” O’Shea said. “You don’t want to be stymied by the process. It’s difficult enough coming up with ideas.”
MPowering also plans to expand the role and operations of the universities’ Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research, a joint research collaboration between this university and UMB.
After the old University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute received formal approval to disband at the turn of the decade, IBBR was created and some of the old biotechnology institute buildings in Montgomery County came under this university’s control.
Now, working with UMB and government research organization National Institute of Standards and Technology, a yearlong search for a full-time director for IBBR is nearing conclusion and Wylie said the new official could be named within the week.
In science, in particular, Wylie said this university and UMB are a good fit to work together, able to collaborate on projects such as pairing this university’s computer science program with a trove of data compiled in Baltimore.
“They have a vast amount of data, and it’s very difficult to make sense out of all that data to benefit mankind,” she said. Their hope is that, with the help of researchers and students at the two universities, it will.
Working with UMB and the NIST, the institute could make progress on new technologies., O’Shea said.
“Our location and the wonderful facilities and IBBR allow us to work more closely with the government agencies and companies to come up with more practical technologies,” he said.
Wylie said IBBR would seek to address a broad range of pharmaceutical research issues.
“We’re looking to partner with the biotech industry, with NIST, to tackle fundamental issues that underlie the advancement of biological drugs and devices,” she said. “We think IBBR will become a major national resource in the coming years.”
Loh said the collaboration on IBBR would help it become a dynamic scientific research destination along the decorated Interstate 270 technology corridor, which runs from Frederick to Bethesda.
“This will be an enormous driver for the development of biotechnology and specifically new therapeutics along 270 because it started with all these little biotech companies and they will want to have relationships with IBBR,” Loh said. “It will put IBBR on the map.”
Wylie said the MPowering initiative was already building a symbiotic relationship between the two schools and the synergistic benefits are becoming clear.
“We came to recognize areas where working together, we could accomplish a great deal more than we could independently,” she said. “We set about to identify areas where collaboration would strengthen both universities and also serve our state, and that’s really what we’ve done.”
