Innovation and Collaboration: Berkeley Lab and Richmond

On Jan. 23, good news came to Richmond, Calif. The Lawrence Berkeley National Lab named the Richmond Field Station as its proposed site for a consolidation of its biosciences programs. The goal here is to move sites the Lab currently leases—such as the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), the Joint Genome Institute (JGI), and the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP)—onto one location. The plan, besides being cost effective for taxpayers, will lead to some other promising outcomes.

A rendering of the proposed LBNL site at the Richmond Field Station.

The new site will be part of more than 100 acres at the Richmond Field Station, already owned by the University of California (which manages Berkeley Lab for the Dept. of Energy).

Approximately 800 people will move to the new site when it’s slated to open in 2016.

First, let’s talk about collaboration, or that dreaded word (though I’ll use it anyway), synergy. The Lab’s leased facilities are currently spread throughout several East Bay cities—Walnut Creek, Berkeley and Emeryville. Consolidating the programs onto one site will lead to new ways of approaching scientific challenges. For those of you that have worked in open labs, newsrooms, or creative spaces, you know that there’s a general sense of excitement when people of various backgrounds and skills find themselves talking over lunch, in the hallway, or at a whiteboard, reaching innovative solutions to common problems.

Universities have taken this to heart by creating collaborative buildings housing various disciplines. In my last position at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the opening of the Annenberg Center for Information Sciences and Technology was a good example:

The Annenberg Center lounge’s second floor has a whiteboard within arm’s reach of the comfy chairs. (From Caltech E&S magazine, 2010)

” The aim of the new facility is to bring physicists, biologists, engineers, and computer scientists together to foster collaboration and interdisciplinary research and teaching,” said a story in the university’s magazine.

And Berkeley Lab’s new Richmond site will do similar…bring geneticists, cancer researchers, biofuels experts, and many others together under one roof.

The assumption is that scientific output is significantly increased when scientists are able to have face-to-face interactions with their colleagues across a variety of disciplines and fields of study. For example, materials scientists from Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry are collaborating with energy efficiency experts from another Lab division to develop multifunctional window coatings for high-performance buildings. That means frequent meetings and near-daily communication.

In another example, a diverse team of Berkeley Lab scientists is working to quickly discover materials that can efficiently strip carbon dioxide from a power plant’s exhaust. That research involves chemists, computer scientists, energy policy analysts, and materials scientists—all working in close proximity and coordination.

And the “collaborating effect” goes beyond the scope of the Berkeley Lab. From a tech perspective, the new campus will also offer an opportunity for industry to be a part of this dynamic change. Future phases of the plan include incorporating private research space nearby, giving industry scientists an opportunity to work with their academic partners and—just as importantly—give Lab researchers an opportunity to work with industry.

Berkeley Lab director Paul Alivisatos meets the media after the Richmond site announcement.

Ideally, the site will foster an environment where Berkeley Lab inventions are licensed and spawned.

“The Richmond Field Station will serve as the site for a vibrant research campus by the Bay that will inspire interaction, collaboration, innovation and invention,” says Bill Lindsay, Richmond City Manager in a release from the city of Richmond.

As Captain Picard of the starship Enterprise frequently said, “Make it so.”

# # #