Overview

HHMI's Janelia Farm Research Campus is a unique, world-class biomedical research complex in Ashburn, Virginia. It is home to a broad range of scientific programs that represent the boldest steps yet in HHMI's quest to speed the development and application of new tools for transforming the study of biology and medicine.

"The HHMI Janelia Farm Research Campus took shape as a sketch on the back of a napkin and is now a reality."

-- Thomas R. Cech, President (2000–2009), Howard Hughes Medical Institute

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The planning and development of Janelia Farm represents a milestone for HHMI as it pursues the long-term objective of offering creative scientists freedom from constraints that limit their ability to do groundbreaking research. The campus and its scientific program complement HHMI's longstanding investigator program. That program currently consists of more than 340 investigators at 70 universities throughout the United States, who have the freedom and flexibility to push the bounds of knowledge in some of the most important areas of biomedical research.

Janelia Farm is an advanced research center that serves as an intellectual hub for up to several hundred scientists from diverse disciplines. They are enabled and supported to work together in multidisciplinary teams to solve challenging biological problems that are difficult to address in existing research settings. Such collaborative groups are "self-assembling" and not imposed in any way. This culture enhances academic freedom by allowing scientists to pursue long-term projects of high significance—projects that could not fit within the confines of a standard grant proposal.

The scientific programs at Janelia Farm are designed to further collaboration and creativity among scientists. Chemists, biochemists, neurobiologists, geneticists, physicists, computer scientists, mathematicians and engineers join together to develop the new tools of biomedical research. Research teams are kept small and lab heads are expected to stay actively involved in performing research, not just manage it or guide it. The architectural design of the Janelia Farm buildings and its laboratories respond to these same objectives, with both work and relaxation areas designed to promote interaction and collegiality—and discourage isolation.

Three elements are essential to the success of Janelia Farm:

• Defining its scientific activities
  and objectives
• Attracting creative and
  adventuresome scientists
• Establishing a supportive
  scientific "culture"

Two primary goals drive the development of programs at Janelia Farm. The first is to establish a research program that places investigators at the interface between emerging technologies and their application to biomedical problems. Janelia Farm provides an opportunity for scientists to collaborate on long-term, multidisciplinary research in a facility specifically designed to support this type of activity.

The second goal is to make available project-oriented resources so that visitors can come together to solve interdisciplinary problems, often making use of new technologies. Up to now, there has been no well-equipped laboratory facility where a group of scientists, each bringing a few members of their research group, could come to work together for periods ranging from a few weeks to several years. No university or research institution is likely to dedicate the required laboratory space or research support for an activity that does not principally benefit its own faculty or teaching mission.

One unique aspect of Janelia Farm is our ability to support large-scale interdisciplinary projects. We define these “team projects” as requiring the collaboration of multiple Janelia lab heads and outside visiting scientists to pursue a goal that is larger than the ability of any one (or two) investigator's lab group. Intellectual forbearers of this concept might include the Manhattan project and the human genome project.

Three such team projects are now being pursued: one to do high-throughput characterizing of the behavioral phenotypes on genetically defined small neural lesions in Drosophila, and two projects aimed at developing both large-scale neuroanatomical data for Drosophila (at the light and electron microscopy levels) as well as accelerating the technology so that even larger anatomical projects can be approached in the future.

We believe that the development of large scale approaches to developing neural wiring diagrams will be fundamental in understanding the large-scale functions of neural circuits. We expect this type of anatomical data to synergize with developing abilities to visualize circuit activity and test circuit mutants at the behavioral level. Thus these three team projects are deliberately chosen to contribute to a new science of physical/functional neurobiology.