Textbook Fusion
A new Harris School initiative links science and policy
HarrisView Magazine, Fall 2010
ASTRONOMY PHD STUDENT REID SHERMAN likes exploring distant worlds. He’s doing thesis work on star formation and, every few months, travels to a radio telescope near the Sierra Nevada Mountains to get a closer look. Back on campus, he’s crossing another divide—the abyss between the physical and social sciences.
Unlike many of his peers, Sherman has little interest in becoming a professor. Instead, he’s exploring career options working with foundations or governments and took a public policy workshop last summer to beef up his resume. “I think scientific analysis is often missing in political issues,” he says. “There needs to be more interaction between scientists and policymakers.”
Many people at the University of Chicago would agree. They include scientists making breakthroughs in stem cell or climate change research; economists concerned with renewable resources or nuclear proliferation; and students looking for deeper insight on issues where energy, the environment, politics, and free markets intersect.
This fall, the Harris School established the Harris Energy Policy Institute as a place where these minds could meet. In addition to a specialized degree program and expanded curriculum, the School is hosting bimonthly faculty workshops and high-profile guest speakers to discuss nuclear policy and other scientific topics that shape our world. “It’s been historically difficult to link scientists and engineers with the folks who think about social and political impacts,” says Robert Rosner, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University and director of HEPI. “If we’re going to take the next big step forward, we need to have all these people at the table.”
SINCE THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO was founded more than a century ago, scientific research has been an integral part of its academic community. Albert Michelson, the first American Nobel laureate, founded the Department of Physics at the turn of the 20th century, and 44 other Nobel laureates have since been associated with the Division of the Social Sciences, more than any other institution in the world.
Internationally recognized for his own work in astrophysics, Rosner left Harvard to join UChicago’s faculty in 1987. Fifteen years later, he was appointed chief scientist, and eventually director, at Argonne National Laboratory. The position required regular meetings in DC to discuss the lab’s role in improving state and national technology infrastructure. “The noise level in Washington is very high,” says Rosner, remembering the range of policymakers he encountered. “Some people are sophisticated and say things that are evidence-based, and then there are people who, well, I would be embarrassed to say some of those things at a cocktail party.”
He’s since crafted two strategies for better linking these science and policy worlds: First, to foster collaborative research between UChicago faculty in departments across campus. Second, to better train students—both in social and physical sciences—to become informed researchers and future policy leaders. When framed around those objectives, he says, establishing HEPI at the Harris School was a no-brainer.
“We shared the same mission,” agrees Harris School Deputy Dean Dan Black, remembering his early discussions with Rosner about developing the institute. “There is a web of connections between things like energy and climate change, job creation and industrial production in the United States. But we all have a mutual goal—to influence policy.”
IN A FOURTH-FLOOR conference room on campus, Rosner smiled beneath his round glasses as University staff and faculty took their seats. This workshop was just one of three held last summer to take inventory of science courses on campus and exchange research ideas. Rosner says holding similar gatherings once a month throughout the school year has been an essential part of getting the institute off the ground.
The faculty projects ranged from pragmatic policymaking to sci-fi laboratory experiments. Don Coursey, a Harris School economist, discussed water markets in New Mexico. Elisabeth Moyer, an assistant professor in geophysical sciences, explained her simulation project for studying climate change. Rosner said he’s developing software for high-speed computers that will model nuclear reactors, encouraging future experiments while reducing radioactive waste.
About two hours in, a researcher from Argonne National Laboratory raised the possibility of biologically engineering a virus that would only attack mosquitoes carrying malaria. “When you have something that’s killing 20 million people a year and you have a way to fix it,” he said, “I know a lot of people who would jump at that opportunity.”
Kennette Benedict, publisher of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, raised concerns about the possible misuse of advances in life sciences, no matter how benign they may seem. “Science is responsibility and we have to think about the unintended consequences,” she warned.
Rosner smiled, invigorated by the discourse. This was exactly what he envisioned when he encouraged the Bulletin to relocate its office to the Harris School, where it moved in late September in concert with HEPI.
Founded in 1945 by a group of Manhattan Project scientists who were worried about nuclear proliferation, the magazine is known best for its Doomsday Clock and in-depth coverage of nuclear issues. The Bulletin has expanded its coverage in recent years to include other topics like climate change and biosecurity.
After living at the University for more than 60 years, the magazine moved to the Loop in 2007 before taking the Harris School’s offer to return. Now back on campus, the Bulletin will remain, as always, an independent entity—it will not represent the views of the University. But Rosner says having it so close to the Harris School will enrich policy discussions and provide a channel for HEPI to bring influential research to a wider audience in Washington.
“Having them in such close proximity will really add to our intellectual environment,” adds Black, who worked with the University provost’s office to orchestrate the agreement. “We’re looking forward to the opportunities that will come from having them here interacting with our students and faculty on a regular basis.” Benedict, for example, taught a course on nuclear policy this fall.
Additional energy-focused instructors like Benedict will help expand the Harris School’s current Environmental Science and Policy master’s degree, which for the past ten years has given policy students a strong foundation in science by letting them take classes in departments across campus. Meanwhile, physical science students can now formally enroll in a Harris School master’s degree (and possibly a future minor for undergraduates) designed specifically for burgeoning scientists who already have advanced math skills but want to study economics and the policymaking process.
Rocky Kolb, chair of the Astronomy and Astrophysics Department, anticipates that many of his students will be interested in the specialized degree—especially those like Sherman planning a career in foundations, governments, and other organizations that interact with policy. “We weren’t serving them,” he explained during the faculty summer workshop. Last summer, he and Black tested the water by offering an experimental two-week policy seminar that more than a half-dozen physical science students attended. That’s a high turnout for any summer program, Kolb says.
“I’m not talking about armies of physical science graduate students crossing the Midway and invading the Harris School,” he clarifies. “But if just a handful become interested in this each year, over time it can have an enormous impact. We’re at a university for goodness’ sake, we have to take advantage of it.”
-Steven Yaccino
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