Dr. Suresh:
Allow me to add an
enthusiastic welcome
to Carnegie Mellon and Pittsburgh on the eve of your formal installment as University President. By
accounts from both CMU press announcements and Pittsburgh media, the University
and the City are honored that you’ve chosen to accept this position. Your work at Brown University, the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the National Science Foundation speaks
volumes for what you’ll accomplish in Pittsburgh.
CMU
and Pittsburgh need more citizens of your experience as stakeholders in our
urban ecosystem. While I have little
doubt that the University and its Board of Trustees are excited about your
history of establishing programs and identifying requisite funding sources to
realize those programs’ success, I am especially heartened by your work at
MIT. While at that school you were
instrumental in establishing the Center for
Computational Engineering. Endeavors
along those lines are specifically what Pittsburgh needs.
In
a recent talk before the Pittsburgh Venture Capital Association, you
highlighted how a relatively small initial investment from a governmental
program such as the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps can be
leveraged into very large investments from the venture capital community ultimately
producing large numbers of start-ups and hopefully longer term
enterprises. Please bring more of that
to Pittsburgh. Lack of capital is often
cited as the number one reason Pittsburgh conspicuously lags other cities that
have not much more in the way of intellectual resources. I applaud your introductory emphasis on
capital investment, no matter its source.
Capital
is the key here: both human and financial.
CMU already has the human capital.
Such an oversupply in fact that it exports most of it to other places
willing to award more financially to CMU’s best thinkers. Financial capital, money, has been the
element lacking in this latest incarnation of Pittsburgh economic
development. The late 19th
and early 20th centuries had Andrew Mellon and his cohorts. Pittsburgh blossomed, not unlike California’s
Bay Area has done in the late 20th century. I urge you to make financial capital
acquisition a top, perhaps the number one, priority.
You’ve
spent much time in Cambridge, Massachusetts at MIT. Walking down Massachusetts Avenue, I noted
that two of the largest and most impressive structures carried names of their
benefactors: Eli and Edythe Broad on the Broad Institute, and David H. Koch of
the eponymous Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. Using these two examples it must be noted
what impressive achievements their investment in MIT given that the Broads call
Los Angeles home and David Koch is basically a Texan, among his many
residences, though also an MIT alumnus.
The
parallels between work being done at these two institutes and work happening at
the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute is striking. Both MIT affiliated institutes were founded
within the last 10 years which is also the time frame for UPCI’s founding. It’s acknowledged that UPCI also partners
with many faculty members from CMU, but I believe CMU can add significant fund
raising muscle to their efforts. The
hard truth is that biotechnology has yet to produce the financial rewards that
computer technology has. UPMC, Pitt’s Medical
School, and UPCI all are loaded with talented, creative individuals and
alumni. But my suspicion is that
currently, the alumni list at CMU has a larger number of individuals with
access to financial capital; individuals who understand cutting-edge research
and its requirements. These are the
people that you, Dr. Subresh, can personally tap for help in CMU’s and
Pittsburgh’s technology efforts.
Allow me to insert a
personal story that illustrates the excitement I’m hoping you will bring to
CMU, the Oakland neighborhood, Pittsburgh and the tri-state region. While competing at last year’s Head of the
Charles Regatta, I was walking with friends past both the Broad and Koch
Institutes. The window displays in both
buildings are impressive to say the least.
Watching the genome of a rabbit being mapped before your eyes, or the
molecular structure of a cancer cell being explained in mind-blowing full color
is an engaging experience for the passer-by.
To that end, I was walking with friends from Austin, TX who were so
impressed with what they saw that they dropped the usual chauvinistic central
Texas viewpoint to comment that “We have multi-colored guitar sculptures on our
streets, and here they show some of the world’s scientific breakthroughs. Wow!”
That summed it up, and that’s what I want for Pittsburgh. You can help bring that to CMU and the City.
