(gentle music)
DAVID MACMILLAN: The Princeton Catalysis Initiative is a,
basically a coming together of scientists
from all over the Princeton campus,
to think about new ways of interacting
and collaborating with each other, that's part one.
But the second part was the sort of metaphor of,
how do we catalyze and interactions
between all these people on campus?
So there was a recognition that we don't have to do
catalysis per se, to be part of this initiative,
but it was really this idea of,
can we provide a new mechanism
that allows people to come together
in a way they haven't come together before,
obviously to achieve what we hope will be
important outcomes.
And when we set out to do this,
our goal for 10 years was to have 120 collaborations.
The fact that we're up to 600 collaborations,
that makes us very excited,
and it points to the fact that I think people really think
the idea is a valuable one and are willing to commit to it.
And I think our number one goal now
is how do we expand that even further?
You can use all of that momentum and energy,
to keep amplifying, and I think that's what we have to do.
We have to keep pushing this to more
and more people on campus, and more and more corporations,
external to Princeton.
MICHELE SARAZEN: Having scientists and researchers
collaborate with industry is extremely important.
And I think it's one of the things that makes PCI unique.
KAUSHIK SENGUPTA: First, it gets people
across the campus, working on very,
very, seemingly different fields, talk to each other.
As faculty members, we are often limited by time,
so there is an activation energy needed
to start new connections.
PCI provides that platform.
MICHELE SARAZEN: Taking chemistry beyond just
the chemistry department,
and applying it to different fields is really powerful,
because you can maintain the sense
of thinking about molecules,
and thinking how molecules interact with materials,
from the chemistry side, but taking it to an applied sense.
KAUSHIK SENGUPTA: I think the second part that PCI does,
it provides an hassle-free mechanism
of pursuing seemingly crazy research, but very high impact.
So in both of these fronts,
getting people talk to each other,
and proposing multidisciplinary efforts,
PCI does it very well.
ZEMER GITAI: The amazing thing about PCI
is that we could very rapidly
and easily go from chatting,
figuring out that we have common interests,
coming up with an idea, finding a student to do it,
and then actually do the work.
So it's that path that they made so easy and so seamless,
that was key to this whole thing working.
DAVID MACMILLAN: PCI acts as a matchmaker between industries
and our campus in a number of different ways.
The first one is that every year we have this really great
symposium that lasts one or two days,
and in this symposium,
we basically have presentations by faculty members.
Unlike most symposia,
these presentations last about five minutes.
You have five minutes, you get up there,
you talk about your best and most exciting work,
and then you sit down again.
And in this way, lots of different scientists
get to see lots of different research ideas,
across many different fields.
And at the same time, we have many representatives
from industries who also come to the symposia.
And so in the block of one day, they can see 30,
maybe even 40, different presentations
that are really, really interesting to them.
SABINE PETRY: I have been involved in the PCI
since the initiative started.
So I was one of the first investigators,
who was invited to participate
at that very first PCI symposium.
Essentially, we presented our research,
and we got the opportunity to hear about the research
from other researchers.
There were networking sessions,
which allowed us to then see if we could actually
form a collaboration, and at the end of the day,
and then the weeks following,
we could essentially then see if such a collaboration
would make sense,
and then essentially put a proposal together.
PAUL CHIRIK: PCI helps overcome funding hurdles
by enabling us
to take basically a conversation that I would have
with a colleague in the hallway,
and turn it into a funded research project.
And what I mean by that is,
I don't have to have preliminary results,
it could just be a gee-whiz idea
that we're both interested in.
And all we have to do is spend a few hours
talking about what I can bring to the table,
what my collaborator can bring to the table.
It's really easy, and it allows you to take that chance,
that you normally wouldn't take.
MICHELE SARAZEN: It's really important to bring diversity
of both scientific backgrounds,
as well as personal backgrounds together,
within a particular collaboration.
As researchers, our job is to ask questions
about the science and the engineering that we're studying.
And if we have the same background,
those questions are all going to sound the same.
And so when we have varied backgrounds coming together,
asking these different questions,
you might get new questions, or even just a different facet
of an old question that can come up,
and actually help to drive scientific progress forward.
SABINE PETRY: In our case, what we're really combining
is microfluidics with applied mathematics,
and molecular biology with biochemistry.
And so what we're essentially doing
is we are putting the cytoplasm of the cell in a droplet.
And so what we're doing
is we're essentially building a cell from scratch,
and on top of that we're trying to make that cell divide.
And so it really opens up the possibility
of creating an artificial cell,
and of essentially studying how the cell
is made from its raw components.
DAVID MACMILLAN: The number one goal of PCI, I would claim,
the number one currency of PCI,
is to create completely new fields of research,
but it's a very, very hard thing to do.
And new fields typically crop up,
I would argue in any given area,
about every eight to 10 years,
in any given scientific discipline.
So one of the goals of PCI is how do you accelerate that?
How do you make all of that come together so much faster,
so that it's not every years,
and it's not a stochastic process,
but it's really a process which you can push
and accelerate to allow maybe a new field every year,
or maybe a new field every six months.
That's one of the major goals of PCI.
ZEMER GITAI: So for me, the most fun thing about PCI
is the idea of going into a room,
and having amazing scientific conversations
with people at Princeton, that are incredible,
that I normally would not get to talk science with.
And what's really special and the most fun,
is going into that room, or into that conversation,
with the knowledge that this isn't
a hypothetical thought exercise,
but that if we really do come up with a great idea,
that we can turn that into something tangible,
into something real.
(gentle music)