BU Social Scientists’ Input Sought for Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Initiative
BU social and behavioral scientists are encouraged to submit their ideas for a proposal for the establishment of a Boston-based Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has invited Letters of Intent to establish a second CZ Biohub, expanding on the success of the initial San Francisco-based CZ Biohub. Following a productive initial meeting of members of Boston-area regional biomedical community, the BU Provost’s office has established a mechanism to collect ideas for focus areas to highlight in an eventual Letter of Intent. This proposal would establish a partnership of Boston University, Harvard University, MIT and UMass Chan Medical School, along with their affiliated hospitals and institutes. The Provost invites all members of our scientific community, spread across multiple institutions, to contribute ideas for focus areas, and proposes a two-pronged mechanism to consider them. The LOI is a joint effort between BU, Harvard, MIT, and UMass Chan Medical School and the Provost’s Office is inviting ideas from faculty at all of these institutions, with an internal deadline of Wednesday, February 16, 2022.
Several mechanisms are in place to facilitate this collaborative effort.
First, Google slide deck has been established to collect ideas from the community. The link is here. Please note the instruction slide at the top of the slide deck and the three, color-coded template slides (one for each category of theme) to copy for your idea slide. Each slide will contain one big idea, with sections to briefly describe the big idea, suggestions for related ideas, keywords, and the names of people interested in working on that idea. All ideas are welcome.
Second, a Slack channel has been set up for people to communicate. The link is here. Eventually, subchannels could be created to flesh out ideas that seem promising.
Because the timeline for the LOI is so short, the team suggests a deadline of one week for creation of the slides with your big ideas (Wednesday, February 9, 2022), and one additional week for nucleation of the ideas and creation of ½ to 1 page descriptions (Wednesday, February 16, 2022). To integrate this community feedback into a set of ideas for possible focus areas of the LOI, they are establishing a “Scoping Committee” of scientists from our four universities who they will ask to review all of the suggestions and then discuss their recommendations with us. This will be facilitated by a community meeting on Wednesday, February 23 for presentation and discussion of the nucleated big ideas in a short (lightning) talk format (5-7 minutes each). The time and zoom link to the community meeting will be forthcoming shortly. For the full memo from the Provost’s office, click: Call-for-Ideas-for-Chan-Zuckerberg-Biohub-Initiative-2-3-22.pdf (bu.edu)