Committee To Explore HMS-SEAS Collaboration

Harvard will announce a University-wide planning committee on bioengineering, which will likely culminate in the creation of a cross-school faculty committee, according to Provost Steven E. Hyman.

“The way to do modern bioengineering is to have an entity that is jointly owned by the engineering school and the medical school,” Hyman said in an October interview.

“If either one does it alone, it’s just not going to be as good as it could be.”

The move builds on recent University efforts to generate collaboration in the sciences, such as the creation last spring of a cross-school Department of Developmental and Regenerative Biology, between Harvard Medical School and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

A faculty committee, unlike a cross-school department, cannot have members who do not have appointments at other schools but can recruit faculty and form tenure committees.

“It’s really about recruiting faculty,” Hyman said. “It’s quite a bit more without becoming a department.”

Associate Provost for Science Kathleen M. Buckley said she expected Allston to play some role in the initiative, but added that she did not think the new campus would have enough space to accommodate the entire effort.

“My guess is that it would be a distributive activity,” she said, “but there may be a nucleus of sorts in Allston.”

A cross-school initiative in engineering has been a focus of the year-old Harvard University Science and Engineering Committee (HUSEC), which is tasked with coordinating University-wide science initiatives.

Hyman, who chairs HUSEC, said that while he desired to push forward on similar initiatives in other areas, Harvard’s historically decentralized structure remains a barrier.

“The harder and more important thing is cultural,” he said. “In this very traditionally decentralized University, we have to do what some of our peer universities have already done, which is to recognize you can’t do bioengineering without working together.”

—Staff writer Clifford M. Marks can be reached at cmarks@fas.harvard.edu.