The new Marian E. Koshland Integrated Natural Sciences Center (KINSC) sports multiple personalities.

Two Views of the KINSC

While the exterior blends with Haverford’s traditional stone architecture, the Center’s interior reveals dozens of research and instructional laboratories built to the exacting standards of contemporary scientific research and teaching. A majestic winding staircase tower links the building’s four levels. The ceiling in the library is high, arched, and sweeping. Pale yellow walls add touches of color.

The labs are stocked with state-of-the-art equipment and computers. There’s a steady hum of conversation as students and professors work together on varied projects.

The Center manages to be both spacious and intimate at once, providing a cozy haven for students of all majors. They sink into plush, oversize chairs with their books and laptops in the lounges, huddle in groups of six or seven around wooden tables in the classrooms, converse and debate on the expanse of the window seats, sprawl on the floor with pencils and papers in communal areas like the math question center, or simply lean their arms along the railings of the walkways linking the various wings and survey the scene.

Most importantly, the KINSC is a harbinger of the future. It combines the departments of astronomy, biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, computer science, and psychology in a totally integrated educational experience. That library with the arched ceiling holds books, journals, and other materials from all the science libraries within its movable shelves. Five separate computational facilities are united in one lab. The laboratories provide space and instruments for students and faculty from the various science disciplines; for example, the basement microscopy lab features different kinds of microscopes to be shared by all departments. The advanced student labs can be found on the same floor, and the hexagonal, “bow-tie” biology lab tables (designed by Karl Johnson, associate professor of biology and chair of the department) allow for a smooth flow of interaction among students and faculty. A secretarial area houses mail centers for all departments. And the communal spaces—central lounges for concerts, receptions, poster sessions and presentations, and all-purpose seminar rooms—serve every member of the Haverford community.

Bearing the name of the late Marian E. “Bunny” Koshland, renowned immunologist and former member of the board of managers, the 188,000-square-foot KINSC is one of the largest of its kind among liberal arts colleges. Facilities of this scale are typically found only at large research universities, or on the campus of organizations like the National Institutes of Health (though in these settings, it’s not feasible to combine all science departments, as the KINSC does). It’s the kind of building that makes current science students glow with pride and prospective (and former) science students salivate with envy. The KINSC reflects Haverford’s status among the top colleges in the country for having the highest percentage of graduates go on to earn Ph.D.’s in the sciences, as well as having the greatest number of highly regarded scientists, receipt of National Science Foundation graduate-study grants, and percentage of students who co-author papers with faculty.

William H. and Johanna A. Harris, with the portrait they reveived at the formal dedication of the KINSC and the Harris Wing on Oct. 5.

The goal of the new center is one shared by many of its educational peers: to integrate student research. It provides greater opportunities for communication and collaboration among departments, while preserving their individuality. And it arrives at a time when the boundaries between most major science disciplines are disappearing, and challenging problems cannot be solved using the tools of chemistry, biology, physics, or math alone.

“Almost all of the frontier disciplines of science are interdisciplinary,” says Lyle Roelofs, professor of physics and associate provost of the College, who served on the KINSC’s executive planning committee. “If five or six people want to investigate certain classes of problems, they’ll be looking at it from different disciplines.”

Yet Haverford’s integrated approach to science doesn’t begin with the new science center. For years, the College has been at the forefront of national efforts to create programs that blend the elements of several science disciplines into one area of study.

When Todd Edwards ’93 was a student at Haverford, he didn’t have the option of concentrating in biophysics until his senior year. Nevertheless, he supplemented his physics major with biology courses and sought advice from associate professor of physics Suzanne Amador Kane, who was hired as Haverford’s first faculty biophysicist in 1991.

With Kane, Edwards worked on a research project that examined a model system for lipid membranes; this involved observing the optical properties of the layers formed by liquid crystals, which behave similarly to cell membranes. During summers, he worked in a molecular biology lab. When he arrived at graduate school at the University of Washington to study bioengineering, he found he was a step ahead of his classmates, most of whom had majored only in biology or engineering.

“I had the basics of both disciplines covered,” he says. “Almost everyone else had to take undergraduate-level biology or engineering.”

After receiving his Ph.D., he went on to teach biophysics at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., after learning about the opening from Kane. Now, he works at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., developing a method to produce proteins in a high throughput fashion and facilitating the study and use of proteins identified by various genome projects.

Edwards’ story is just one example of how Haverford tries to secure a successful future for its students with interdisciplinary science programs like the biophysics/biochemistry concentration. The history of this interaction can actually be traced back to 1953, when Haverford became the first institution of higher education in the United States to develop an undergraduate program focused on the chemical and cellular aspects of biology. In 1988, the College was among the first schools to benefit from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute grants, which support curricular initiatives leading to biologically oriented courses in the study of chemistry and physics. The institute awarded Haverford $1.2 million to help the science departments create an interdisciplinary nucleus of faculty in biology and other disciplines. In the early 1990s, additional funds allowed the school to flesh out its biochemistry and biophysics concentrations with new faculty members and the necessary physical resources.

According to professor of chemistry Julio de Paula, a biophysical chemist, the concentrations recognize current and enduring trends in “real world” science. “Biochemistry, for instance, impacts the bulk of new medical therapies,” he says. “All new drugs created in labs need to be studied biochemically. It’s also important in agriculture; we need to know the molecular workings of plant and soil to improve crop production.”

In a recent article from the American Journal of Physics, Suzanne Amador Kane explained how she had seen many students leaving physics programs because they were unaware of options for combining it with biology and chemistry. Research universities, she says, are forming multidisciplinary research centers to address problems in biophysical chemistry, biophysics, neuroscience, bioengineering, and computational biology, and many prominent biologists are reassessing the skills required for biological and biomedical research, and how these skills should impact the design of biology programs. “We see the role of undergraduate physics programs as addressing these needs in a twofold manner,” she says. “They encourage physics majors to learn about biology, while stimulating biology and chemistry majors to learn more about physics while seeing more clearly the relationship of physics to their own fields.”

Julio de Paula praises the intensity of both programs, which go above and beyond what is called for in a science major. “This is increasingly the way science is done in the ‘real world,’” he says. “In graduate school academic labs, or pharmaceutical and industrial labs, there are no real boundaries between the sciences.” These programs give students early exposure to the realities of scientific research, not just with courses and labs but also with opportunities like the Howard Hughes Interdisciplinary Science Scholars Program, which allows students to explore interdisciplinary science and math outside their majors during summer research fellowships at Haverford.

Howards Hughes scholar and Haverford senior Catherine O’Conor spent the summer of 2002 in the lab of associate professor of chemistry Karin Åkerfeldt, finding methods for determining the structure of certain calcium-binding proteins. “After college, I plan to enter a combined M.D./Ph.D. program,” she says. “I have always wanted to be a doctor, but my education at Haverford has shown me the benefits of looking at a problem from many points of view. I believe this will make me a more effective physician.”

In addition to biology and chemistry, physics majors also have the opportunity to concentrate in computer science, in a program that focuses on the hardware aspects of the discipline and the basics of physics and electronics. According to Lyle Roelofs, who teaches in the concentration, the computer is ubiquitous in physics research and teaching; it facilitates work for experimenters and stimulates physical systems for theorists. “Modern computer hardware comes from inventions in the physics world,” he says. “In designing a computer, hardware issues are physics issues. The focus is that interaction.”

Spaces are designed to facilitate collaborative scientific work.

The computer science concentration in the math major, which focuses primarily on mathematical foundations instead of the physical devices from which computers are built, is an understandable combination of two like-minded areas of study. But there are other, less-expected ways Haverford tries to integrate math with other scientific disciplines, says assistant professor of mathematics Rob Manning. “Most graduates of liberal arts colleges don’t become professional mathematicians, but instead pursue such professions as consulting or law,” he says. “By studying natural sciences, they figure out how to take a mathematical approach to problem-solving.” Manning himself uses this approach in his own work, as part of a nanotechnology research group that includes two biologists, two chemists, and two physicists.

Bioinformatics, or computational biology, a relatively new field that uses the tools of computer science and mathematics to analyze genetic data, is also attracting the interest of Haverford faculty and students. Although there is no formal class offered in this subject, junior Ethan Roland, another Howard Hughes scholar, was able to spend the past summer performing research in the field. His project dealt with the genes of the nematode worm C. elegans. “Rather than performing the classical ‘wet-lab’ analyses of our gene, I dealt with computerized forms of the actual DNA and amino acid sequence on the computer,” he says. “I learned how to use a variety of computer programs to compare and analyze multiple genes and proteins.” At the end of the summer, Roland traveled to Canada for a conference called “Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology,” where he met some of the key researchers in the bioinformatics field and learned more about the directions in which this field is heading.

“It is extremely exciting to me that we are beginning to describe the infinitely complex and seemingly subjective natural world in terms of an objective science like math,” he says. “I like the logical methods of math and computer science, and fitting biology to such models is amazing.”

In the neural and behavioral sciences program, the natural science of biology is paired with the (typically) social science of psychology. Students in the concentration gain expertise in both behavioral research and the study of the brain’s structure and function.

“They study brain behavior interface from the perspectives of both biology and psychology,” explains associate professor of psychology Wendy Sternberg, whose own study of the neural mechanisms of pain perception uses biological techniques and principles to understand psychological phenomena. “The students’ labs mirror what you’d find in a biology lab.”

Students in the concentration, especially those heading to medical school, will benefit from their training in behavioral and life sciences research methodologies, says Sternberg: “It puts them a step ahead in medical research.”

Because psychology, as a discipline, has feet in both the natural and social sciences, it was difficult to classify as a division during the planning of the KINSC and raised questions about whether or not it should be included in the complex. “Intellectually,” says Sternberg, “it made sense for us to stay near biology and foster further collaborations.”

Sternberg’s concern was one of many voiced by faculty and staff during the planning of the KINSC, as they labored to develop a building that would adequately support and enhance Haverford’s existing opportunities for interdisciplinary education and research—and create new ones for the future.

In 1993, during Tom Kessinger’s tenure as president of the College, a group of faculty and staff members proposed a redesign of Stokes Hall, then the home of the chemistry, computer science, math, and physics departments.

“Stokes was state-of-the-art when it was built in the 1960s,” says Karl Johnson, “but the definition of ‘state-of-the-art’ was changing. The College was half its current size in the ’60s.”
The group’s suggested redesign sought to accommodate all departments, upgrade labs, and add a new building. But as the vision evolved, the faculty and staff involved realized that more than just the building was in need of an overhaul. “They saw that much would be gained by not only upgrading, but integrating all the sciences,” says Roelofs.

An influential memo penned by professor of physics Jerry Gollub and professor of biology (and now, director of the KINSC) Judy Owen stated the case for the integrated future of science. The professors reminded administrators of the fact that, during the past six to eight years, Haverford had hired scientists with experience in several areas, such as biophysicist Kane and biochemist de Paula. Gollub and Owen also explained that Haverford’s small size would be advantageous when gathering the sciences into one complex.

“The need to develop collaborations among people working in different disciplines was impeded by having the scientists in different physical locations,” says Owen. “If, for example, one scientist needed a fragile sample from another building, someone would have to take the risk of moving that sample across campus.” Uniting the sciences under one roof would also be beneficial in an intangible way, she explains:” If one of us became excited about a new idea or breakthrough, we could dash into the hall and spill the idea to another colleague right away.”

In a statement before the board of managers in 1996, Gollub stressed the necessity of an integrated educational approach to meet students’ changing needs. “We know that most Haverford science graduates will have careers that are not centered on any one discipline,” he said. “This implies that most of our students will be best served by programs that combine the elements of several science disciplines.”

From 1993 on, administrators, faculty and staff began exploring the possibilities of an integrated science complex. Acting president Bob Gavin, who served from 1993 to 1994, and current president Tom Tritton, who was appointed in 1995, were instrumental in the decision-making process, says Owen. “They encouraged us to look at all the advantages this would mean for the College as a whole, not just the sciences,” she says. “They both tried to make it a campus-wide initiative.”

When Tritton arrived, he helped install a dual committee strategy for planning. A steering committee with representatives from each science department, physical plant, and two faculty members from the humanities and social sciences (David Dawson from religion and Laurie Hart from anthropology) would work with the newly chosen Baltimore-based architectural firm of Ayers, Saint & Gross. The executive committee would oversee the financial aspects and included the president, then-provost Elaine Hansen, vice president for finance and administration Dick Wynn, and such faculty members as de Paula and Roelofs. “This committee strategy served us effectively,” says Roelofs, “because the individual departments got to meet with the architects and design the space. This prevented many possible mistakes.” Once construction commenced, a faculty liaison was appointed to attend biweekly construction meetings and report back to the committees on progress, address ambiguities, and facilitate communication between the construction manager and all of the departments. The liaison position was split between de Paula and Roelofs; when Roelofs became associate provost, de Paula took on the responsibilities full time.

From the earliest planning stages, the initiative for the new science center had the full support of the Koshland family, particularly Marian and Daniel Koshland. Their advice was invaluable, not only as friends of the College, but also as esteemed scientists in their own right. Marian, formerly chair of the microbiology and immunology department at the University of California at Berkeley, was a decorated immunologist, a past president of the American Association of Immunologists and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. She discovered one of the components of the immunoglobulin molecules, the IgM-associated J chain, and in her later years became an expert on the differentiation of antibody-secreting cells, B lymphocytes. In 1982 she became one of the first women elected to Haverford’s board of managers, and the College awarded her an honorary doctor of science degree in 1995 to honor her contributions to Haverford’s science programs and the scientific community in general.

Daniel Koshland, who spent 34 years as a researcher and professor of molecular biology at Berkeley, advanced the understanding of enzymes and protein chemistry and the concept of the sequential model of enzyme action, which lead to the development of the “induced fit theory.” “His work on this theory was one of the first scientific papers I read as a student at Cambridge,” recalls Owen. He was editor of Science magazine for 10 years and is a recipient of the Albert Lasker Award, called “America’s Nobel Prize,” for Special Achievement in Medical Science. Currently, he studies the chemical reactions involved in Alzheimer’s disease by analyzing changes in brain cells.

“Being a science family, they could put the right kinds of instructions on us,” says Roelofs. And from the start, the Koshlands made it clear that they supported an interdisciplinary program, not just a physical structure.

Marian’s death in 1997 saddened Haverford’s science community, and accelerated its determination to develop the kind of program and complex she would have envisioned. In 1999, Daniel Koshland made a $15 million gift to Haverford in support of the new science center, which would be named in memory of his wife.

“Marian believed fervently in our shared vision of combining research with more formal teaching in undergraduate education,” says Owen, a longtime friend and colleague. “And she saw, before many, the importance of abolishing the boundaries between the scientific disciplines.”
Construction of the Marian E. Koshland Integrated Natural Sciences Center was completed last summer, during which time the various departments dealt with the arduous task of transporting books, computers, equipment, and papers to their new offices and labs. Students began attending classes in the KINSC in September, and the complex was formally dedicated on Saturday, Oct. 5, during Leadership Weekend.

Most recently, Haverford has named a wing of the new center after one of the world’s leading experts in orthopedic surgery, Dr. William H. Harris ’49, and his wife, Johanna A. Harris. The Harrises are among the leaders in Haverford’s $200 million campaign because of their strong belief in the College and its role in perpetuating the best in science education among its peers. “Science at Haverford since the ’50s has been a bright example of the integration of interdisciplinary activity,” said Harris, emeritus chief of adult reconstruction surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. “We are dedicating not just the physical plant, but the spirit of science that it represents—a commitment to excellence and a flexibility in approach and technique that excites bright young minds about the process of science and the potential it has for improving life.”

Now it’s up to the Center’s steering committee, headed by director Owen, to facilitate its operations not just as a building but also as an intellectual unit. The committee will plan activities, courses, and seminars, look for ways to integrate the College as a whole, pursue grants for interdisciplinary study, and seek further methods to create collaborative educational opportunities for students. One option is to integrate the “Superlabs,” one-year lab courses taken by juniors in which they master the methodologies and tools of scientists and apply them to answer real questions. “We want the Superlabs to have fewer and fewer boundaries,” says Roelofs, “and open the horizons of students to value the experimental techniques of other disciplines.”

The time hasn’t yet come for single-focus majors like biology and chemistry to become obsolete. Still, faculty and students are looking to the Koshland Integrated Natural Sciences Center as a continued means of fostering groundbreaking interaction among the departments. “We hope to erase the divisional lines in the sand,” says Wendy Sternberg, a member of the steering committee, “and focus on what unites us instead.”