A Record Gift from Rajen Kilachand - CC
If you think about Boston University’s emergence as a major, private research university, it
has occurred because of the focus and the dedication of the University faculty and staff
around the vision of who we wanted to be.
It’s been missing one major component.
The major component has been philanthropic support of the University.
So when we launched out first ever capital campaign in 2012 that was the goal.
There’s always, it’s a tradition.
There’s a giving pyramid.
The top block is what you need that really becomes the foundation almost for the entire
campaign.
We were always wondering who would fill that?
What would it represent?
It’s really exciting to announce that Rajen Kilachand has made a generous gift of $115
million dollars to support both the building and the endowment that will, in perpetuity,
support research at the intersection between life science and engineering.
The Kilachand Center is actually made up of three research centers: The Biological Design
Center, the Center for Systems Neuroscience, and also the Center for Sensory Communication
and Emerging Neural Technology.
Each of these centers incorporates faculty from a wide range of disciplines.
So we have faculty who are taking computational approaches.
Faculty who are involved in basic science, basic chemistry.
Faculty who are involved in doing behavioral testing of various sorts.
We are the tip of the iceberg in this sort of concept of people working together with
different specialties.
This sort of interaction is going to be, now, the only way for education institutions to
make society into what we all dream about.
This kind of collaboration between different groups of scientists has been very common
in the commercial world.
To have that institutionalize within the academic world is an incredibly powerful positioning
for BU to have this kind of interdisciplinary activity.
All across the country and the world, universities are putting emphasis on interdisciplinary
research.
It’s easy to talk about it.
What’s really important for an institution is to truly invest in it.
So when we think about trying to bring people together we think about putting resources
in that do exactly that.
One of the things that we really love about the Center is that we have so many different
groups that are now talking to each other in ways, very deep ways, ways that we never
would have imagined before.
And that really does a good job of getting us to think, in a sense, outside of our normal
range of scientific topics and think in terms of some of the engineering developments, people
using new techniques.
What we are trying to accomplish with the construction of the Kilachand Center was to
create a space that would allow for the kind of collaborative science that we want to have
happen, and also to build a building that was flexible and that was for the future.
Because we don’t know where science is going to go at any given time.
This constant change, especially in the sciences, is a fact of life.
That’s the only thing that is an all-time constant.
I have no doubt that the leaders of BU will ensure that they will be ahead of the change,
if I may say.
I think philanthropy to major universities, major research centers, is becoming more and
more important.
Because we have to depend less on the government and more on individuals to really sponsor
the kind of research centers that we need to make headway.
It’s absolutely critical that universities have support from private philanthropy to
take up that slack.
So this has been a tremendous commitment by the University, led by Rajen Kilachand, to
make sure that we are staying in the forefront of research of this type.
I wish that more and more people did the same thing.
I’m sure we could then solve a lot of problems of mankind otherwise faster than we will.
I’m convinced, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that BU is going to be a leader in this field.