West Campus Will Be A ‘Transformative’ Space, Says Donoghue

Published: June 12, 2009

The West Campus, says Vice President Michael Donoghue, eventually will be a place where the sciences, medicine and the arts mingle.

New Haven, Conn. — When Yale purchased the 136-acre Bayer Healthcare complex in West Haven in 2007, it effectively increased the size of its campus by 40%.

The complex, now known as the West Campus, is "way more than an expansion project," asserts Michael Donoghue, who was appointed by President Richard C. Levin as the first vice president for West Campus planning and program development.

"The one word that best summarizes the promise of West Campus is ‘transformative,'" says Donoghue, who is also the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

RELATED STORIES
- Diverse Interests Helping Identify Common Themes for Complex’s Future
- Many West Campus Facilities Now Available to Departments
- ‘Critters Camp’ and ‘Wetlands Safari’ Camps To Be Held at West Campus

Donoghue took time out of his hectic schedule recently to discuss the blueprint he is developing for the West Campus and the impact of this historic acquisition on faculty, students and the community. The following is an edited version of that discussion.

The scale of the West Campus is so vast — 136 acres, 17 buildings, 434,000 square feet of research laboratories, over a million square feet of office and warehouse space, parking for over 2,700 cars. What impact will these facilities have on Yale?

The West Campus gives us an opportunity to do something really special. By harnessing the amazing talent we have at Yale and bringing faculty from diverse disciplines together in unique ways, we'll be able to tackle really large problems that can have a profound effect on human welfare.

When fully operational, the West Campus will place Yale in a very special category. Only a few universities in the world will have the power to do the kinds of sophisticated and truly multidisciplinary research that Yale will be undertaking on the West Campus. And the same goes for the communal work we'll be pursuing with our museum collections, libraries and art schools.

It is a once in a lifetime opportunity for Yale. We want to make sure we take full advantage of this windfall. That's why we convened a day-long brainstorming session at the West Campus in mid-May — bringing together 70 faculty representatives from the School of Medicine, from the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and from science departments in the Faculty of Arts and Science (FAS), to help crystallize a common vision for the future of science at Yale (see related article), so that the West Campus can become just the right vehicle to realize our aspirations.

How will the economic downturn affect the master plan for the West Campus?

Fortunately, the recession will have relatively little impact on the West Campus at this stage of the game, since our focus now is mainly on planning. And while planning is very time intensive, it's not so capital intensive. I am spending most of my time talking to faculty and key administrators around the University, trying to come up with a coherent blueprint that can be implemented over the next several decades. Since there is no roadmap for a project of this scale, we are proceeding with some caution. It's much more important for us to get this right than to rush in and start populating the West Campus, just because it is there.

Are there Yale departments that have already taken up residence on the West Campus?

Two groups of "pioneers" are working on the West Campus today — a science team and a museum team. On the science side, there are about 16 people running the High Throughput Cell Biology (HTCB) facility — the first of three science core facilities that we are planning. The HTCB enables researchers to systematically suppress genes to explore their roles in the function of a cell. This operation is headed by Lars Branden, under the direction of Jim Rothman, the chair of the medical school's Department of Cell Biology.

The other two cores — a chemical screening facility that will be overseen by Craig Crews in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology (MCDB), and a gene-sequencing core, which will be headed by Rick Lifton in the Department of Genetics — will come on line over the next six months.

The other group that has been especially active is from the Peabody Museum, which is occupying about 60,000 square feet in Building A-21, the former manufacturing building. These are primarily curatorial staff, working under the leadership of Tim White. They are conducting the delicate task of moving over one million artifacts from storage facilities on the Central Campus to cavernous new storage and restoration spaces that are being set up in A-21. A contingent from the Yale Art Gallery also will be restoring some large mosaics and period rooms on the West Campus.

When you add in the security, maintenance, and power plant employees, and administrative personnel on the site, there are close to 90 Yale people on the West Campus. We've begun to have "town meetings" to build a sense of community and to get inputs on the life and management of the site.

What kinds of interdisciplinary research projects do you envision being conducted on the West Campus?

The West Campus is all about uniting disciplines that, due to the geography and space constraints of Central Campus, don't have the opportunity of working together. We are hoping that the several major institutes envisioned for the West Campus will bring together faculty from the School of Medicine, the School of Engineering and the FAS sciences departments.

As an example, the Microbial Diversity Institute will co-locate faculty from many different disciplines — evolutionary biology, microbial pathogenesis, geology, molecular biology, engineering and forestry. The idea is to hire some new faculty leaders and to combine them with some of the great faculty who are already here. This interdisciplinary team will work, in various combinations, on challenging problems that cannot be addressed within a single discipline. Exciting things happen at the margins of the traditional disciplines.

We're also planning to build partnerships with industry, pursuing nanotechnology and pharmaceutical research. Working closely with the Office of Cooperative Research, we'll expand the reach of the West Campus well beyond Yale.

How will you link the West Campus with Central Campus? Is a rail stop in West Haven a possibility?

Transportation is, of course, a key to making the West Campus accessible to students and faculty. We currently have a shuttle bus service, which is functional but limited. This service will be greatly expanded as our population increases. We have some great ideas about making the West Campus shuttle fun and productive. We're thinking about vans with Internet service and comfortable seats that swivel to facilitate conversations. We might even serve lattes — people will look forward to riding the "discussion bus"!

We also are engaged in conversations with Metro North about plans to add two new stations near the West Campus: one in West Haven, about a mile from campus, which is scheduled to open in 2011, and one at the southwest corner of the campus, which could come on line by 2015. We're also looking at the feasibility of a bike path that would link the West Campus to Central Campus.

I've been thinking that another way of uniting the two campuses is by building something tall on the West Campus — maybe a wind turbine — that you could see from the Central Campus, just as Kline Biology Tower is visible from the West Campus. Creating a visual link between the two campuses may help people, subliminally, to think of them as part of a single enterprise.

Many people think of the West Campus as a science research facility, but, according to your master plan, half of the space will be devoted to the arts. Do you foresee interactions between these traditionally disparate disciplines?

Since the West Campus was built as a pharmaceutical research park, it's logical to focus on the great science facilities on the site. But there are other spaces that are excellent for our museum and library collections, and for the arts.

At the moment, we are planning two core facilities for the arts — a Conservation Core and Digitization Core. These centers will have sophisticated instrumentation for imaging and the technical analysis of materials. In addition, the nuclear magnetic resonance machines and mass spectometers in the core science facilities will be accessible to researchers analyzing the composition of archeological specimens or works of art — so the instrumentation will help bridge the arts and the sciences.

So, too, will the central cafeteria, once it is opened. I'm convinced that the artists and scientists will really enjoy getting to know one another, and will benefit from their interactions. These encounters are really difficult on the Central Campus just because we're physically so separated.

Will there be programs for students on the West Campus?

I envision lots of opportunities for undergraduates to do research and special projects on the West Campus — as early as next year — in both the arts and the sciences. There will also be opportunities for students to volunteer in the environmental education programs that we'll run along Oyster Creek, which flows right through the campus.

Undergrads who want to undertake a project that requires more space than is available on Central Campus — whether for a large sculpture or an engineering project — should look into the facilities available on the West Campus.

Graduate student seminars will certainly be taught on the campus, especially taking advantage of the core facilities, but for the next few years I don't envision a lot of standard classroom instruction on the West Campus.

Is it true that there are plans to put medical facilities on the West Campus?

Yes, we're studying this. There are two modern administrative buildings near the entrance to the site that would be ideal for outpatient clinics. These are huge buildings with lots of adjacent parking. The medical school has engaged consultants to determine the feasibility of establishing some ambulatory medical facilities in these buildings.

The Yale Health Plan will also eventually have an operation on the West Campus, to serve both campus employees and Yale families who live west of New Haven.

How will you use the acres of undeveloped land on the West Campus? Has there been any consideration of building graduate housing on the site?

We plan to provide community access to the open land on the West Campus on at least two levels. An outdoor education center will take advantage of about 30 acres of undeveloped land running along Oyster Creek, which bisects the campus. There will also be a community education center on the West Campus, run by the Peabody Museum.

We have had some preliminary discussions about building graduate student housing near the proposed train station on the Orange side of the campus, but I'm guessing that those plans are still 10 years out. We're also anxious to provide recreational facilities once we have grad students living on the West Campus.

As a leading evolutionary biologist, you have been in great demand during this bicentennial celebration of Charles Darwin's birth. Have you been able to find time to pursue your own research on the Tree of Life?

It's been a fun year! I've given many speeches about Darwin and the Tree of Life this year, most recently in Sevilla, Spain.

I'm fortunate to have a very active lab — with excellent grad students and postdocs. We are publishing a lot on the evolutionary history of plants, and I fully expect that to continue. With Scott Strobel and other Yale colleagues, we also just submitted a grant to the National Science Foundation for $25 million to discover and utilize the fungi that live inside of plants. If we get the funding, that project will be centered on the West Campus.

Of course, I'm pretty busy with West Campus planning, so I mostly do my own research late at night and on the weekends. But, it all works!

— By Robin Hogen

PRESS CONTACT: Robin Hogen 203-432-5423