The Institute is beginning to plan its next scientific initiatives, and I think new leadership should be in place before those are launched. As I have shared with HHMI staff, continuity of leadership was very important for building the Janelia Farm Research Campus. The same leadership team was involved in the entire process—beginning with the early vision that developed from a conversation I had with Gerry Rubin, now Janelia Farm's director, and David Clayton, now vice president for research operations—through to program planning, architectural design, construction, staffing, and the emergence of a lively scientific community. The “next great thing” deserves that same leadership commitment over an extended period of time.

This is an exciting moment in HHMI's history, and I look forward to the outcomes of several initiatives now under way. For example, we're in the final stages of selecting a new group of investigators, the result of our first general competition in which scientists applied directly to HHMI. The process of soliciting institutional nominations worked well in the past, but direct applications are bringing us a broader and deeper pool of candidates. The open application process is stimulating our long-term efforts to expand the definition of biomedicine to embrace interdisciplinary work involving chemists, physicists, engineers, and computer scientists.

Under the leadership of Jack Dixon, HHMI's chief scientific officer, we're undertaking another initiative called the collaborative innovator awards to further interdisciplinary research and extend HHMI's support into the wider scientific community. For the pilot round, we asked our investigators to propose particularly challenging and potentially transformative research opportunities that involve collaborators outside the HHMI community and to devise plans for tackling them. We hope to select the first recipients shortly; as the effort proceeds, we will consider expanding the program to a larger group of scientists.

The work of HHMI will continue to unfold over the next year as the Trustees seek my successor, who will have the responsibility and joy of planting new ideas and watching them flower. I will have the privilege of returning to a cherished role, that of an HHMI investigator, and the joy of discovery.

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