Mission Statement:
Research space at UCSF is guided by Departments who ‘owns’ space and is focused on allocations to those departments and by extension to specific labs. Space is held with great vigor and is seen as a means to an end and not to be easily shared. This culture creates conditions in which fluid movements of labs from space to space only occurs with million-dollar renovations.
Equally importantly, balkanization also obviates fluid movement of fellows and students amongst the labs of PIs—and particularly across the multiple campuses. Such movements, if a part of our core culture, might offer considerable benefit as disciplines evolve. Imagine that you needed to do a CRISPR screen but have never done high-throughput genomics—So, move that person to be adjacent to the Genomics CoLab. Imagine you want to develop a microscopy or flow project, move that person to BIDC or flow core. Or that a fellow or clinical fellow wants to do a one-year stint in which they want to work on making things from liberated tissue samples—putting them close to D2B to benefit from local expertise and reagents. These are not ‘CoProjects’ but in fact individual projects, put into a best-in-class incubator.
We propose to create a pilot 5-year project termed ‘The Sandbox’, which re-envisions how some space may be allocated at UCSF. The goal of the Sandbox is to both encourage collaborations across labs and campuses and, by extension, change the culture of space allocation towards one in which space allocation is a means to an end and not an end unto itself. The initiative gets its name from children’s sandboxes, in which numerous kids can join and, when monitored, share nicely and build elaborate sandcastles and collaborative stories.
Read details here.