"Creating an easy environment is no easy job."

Cheryl Moore lives within 10 miles of her office, gets 8 hours of sleep most nights, and limits herself to one cup of coffee a day. Those numbers, she says, are "the only constant sanity" in her workweek.

As Janelia Farm's chief operating officer, Moore spends her time creating, from scratch, the environment that will greet Janelia Farm scientists when they arrive on the campus, which formally opens this summer. Decisions—from budgets and staffing to operations, and involving issues profound and mundane—dominate her days: How can HHMI ensure that scientists on campus frequently rub elbows, engaging in a social form of Brownian motion? Are we ordering the right supplies for the stockroom? How much should soda cost on campus?

Willowy and brisk, Moore, age 40, has a quick, confident laugh and an air of quiet focus. Her office is a cheerful yellow, evoking her previous home in sunny San Diego, California, where she served as senior vice president/chief operating officer for The Burnham Institute, a nonprofit organization devoted to biomedical research. Today, the view from Moore's office is decidedly mid-Atlantic, with a window framing the Virginia meadow that tops Janelia Farm's green roof.

"Everything I am working on is designed to create a culture in which science can move forward, free from bureaucratic hassle," says Moore, who started planning for Janelia's opening 2 years ago. "If we succeed," she says, "scientists at Janelia will enjoy a kind of tunnel vision, focusing on their work in an environment of quiet comfort. My goal is to use common sense, rather than a detailed rule book, to respond to situations that arise. The trick is to make the complexity of federal, state, and Institute rules invisible to our researchers. They'll just need to explain to us what they're trying to do, and we'll figure out how to get them what they need. This is the type of customer-service-driven support team we're building."

The difficult part of her job, Moore admits, is that "none of this exists yet." She begins each day by scanning her to-do list, which typically runs several pages, with a half-dozen must-do-immediately tasks and an additional 40 to 50 with a turnaround time of about a week. Although addicted to her BlackBerry and Microsoft Outlook, Moore says her favorite organizational tool is decidedly retro—a spiral notebook. In it, she reserves a page for each of Janelia Farm's five operational directors as well as for other staff—including Gerry Rubin (Janelia's director) and Kevin Moses (associate director for science and training). When an issue pops up, she jots a reminder on the indicated page to discuss that issue with the appropriate person. Then, during meetings or chance hallway chats, out comes the notebook.

And there are plenty of encounters, planned or otherwise. Every week, in addition to dozens of informal conversations, Moore holds an individual hour-long meeting with Moses and with each Janelia Farm operational director. "About six or seven times a day, we'll have a quick stand-up meeting in the hall to brief those who need to know about a change that's just happened," she says. Rubin and Moore also share the occasional marathon planning session.

Until recently, Moore—a semivegetarian who favors ethnic dishes such as spicy black bean soup—typically worked through lunch, eating at her desk. But having noticed that most of Janelia Farm's current staff was doing the same, she began booking the conference room at noon to encourage everyone to come together and eat.

In much the same way, she is making nuts-and-bolts decisions aimed at enabling interaction among Janelia's future workforce. In fact, lunch is one example. When the campus formally opens for business, the cafeteria will offer a compressed lunch hour. The idea, Moore says, is to balance a scientist's desire to grab a quick lunch and return to work with HHMI's desire to foster brainstorming and bonding on campus. "We want to increase people's opportunity to bump into each other," she explains. But quickly feeding hundreds of scientists isn't a piece of cake, so to speak. To help make it work, Janelia Farm will implement a cashless purchase system in which staff members use swipe cards to pay for lunch, thereby speeding checkout.

To cultivate contact in the afternoon, the facility will host a daily 30-minute tea, with free snacks, in the campus pub. Rubin and Moore plan to attend.

Another item on the agenda is how to design orientation for Janelia Farm researchers. Moore and others have decided that incoming scientists will attend one full day of orientation that covers practical topics such as how to get a cashless charge card, how to order supplies, where the support labs are, and how to get a computer account as well as dozens of other issues big and small. "When they walk out of those sessions," she expects, "they'll be ready to hit the ground running."

A bigger and more immediate task for Moore is interviewing candidates for jobs at Janelia Farm. A comprehensive administrative and support staff will include individuals to run the campus machine shop, electronic library, shared scientific resources, computer network, and other services. When fully operational, Janelia Farm will employ an estimated 300 resident scientists, 100 visiting scientists, and 80 other staff.

"The details of each day vary, with different decisions to be made," Moore says. "But I'm always working on the same basic thing: infrastructure for creating an environment in which science can move forward. That means setting our top priorities, constantly reviewing them, and slowly working our way through the list." There are days when that list seems to stretch to the horizon. Thankfully, drugstores stock lots of spiral notebooks.

—Kathryn Brown

Photo: Paul Fetters

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