Portrait of an Artist...and a Scientist - Wisconsin Alumni Association

Portrait of an Artist . . .Nothing short ofrevolutionary in highereducation, a UWprogram is luringfaculty such asGelsomina De Stasioand building newintellectual teams.BY BRIAN MATTMILLER ’86PHOTOS BY JEFF MILLERGelsomina De Stasio mightbe called a scientist, butthat’s only the beginning.Yes, she’s an esteemedphysicist, but in her classroom, sheintroduces non-majors to the principlesof physics through the study of art. Andthe canvases in her home? She paintedthem herself.The talents that she brings to herfaculty position allow her to bridge traditionalacademic disciplines and createnew knowledge — the foremost goal ofthe Strategic Hiring Initiative, a newUW-Madison experiment that is generatingenthusiasm across the campus andcapturing interest across the nation.The program is the result of somethingthat could happen in the businessworld, but had simply never happened inhigher education. Faculty were invited toteam with their colleagues to proposeinnovative ways of working, then entertheir proposals into a competition. Theselected proposals, they were told, wouldhelp to shape a bold new direction.Creating paintings that share a style similar to M.C. Escher’s perception-bending images fillsreflective time for physics professor Gelsomina De Stasio. This canvas, she explains, featuresan image of herself on a series of rootless and distorted-reality platforms and stairways.The opportunity did have one catch:proposals had to build alliances acrossdepartments. In a private company,that might mean forging partnershipsbetween creative services and accounting,or reaching out to distribution andmarketing, or linking up technologywith human resources. At UW-Madison, it meant blending the expertiseof faculty from different disciplines,different departments, even differentschools and colleges.But the rewards would be significant.Not only would winners be36 ON WISCONSIN

and a Scientist“Knowledge once gained casts a light beyond its immediate boundaries.”— JOHN TYNDALL, NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH PHYSICISTrewarded with a green light to implementtheir ideas, they’d also get fundingfor enough new positions to have a realshot at succeeding.Faculty jumped at the opportunity.In the first year alone, more than onehundred hiring proposals were submittedby interdisciplinary teams involvingmore than four hundred faculty. Now inits third year, the initiative, known internallyas “cluster hiring,” has supportedninety new positions — but that onlyscratches the surface of its impact. Theprogram represents an approach that isnothing short of revolutionary in therealm of higher education.Renaissance Scientist“My ideal scientist is Leonardo daVinci,” says De Stasio, a native of Rome,Italy. “He could move 360 degrees, beinterested in many different disciplines atone time, and excel in all of them.”Just as Leonardo melded a passionfor painting with his expansive mindfor invention, De Stasio also coversdivergent ground.The 1999 addition to the physicsdepartment belongs to a cluster hiringarea called biophotonics. Her group isconcerned with the development of newmicroscopes that peer deeply into theinner workings of cells. De Stasio’s ownmicroscope, nicknamed Mephisto, iscurrently one of the highest-resolutionx-ray microscopes in the world.She spends a lot of her time at theSynchrotron Radiation Center inStoughton, an underground electronaccelerator ring that helps to illuminatesome of the invisible forces of nature.De Stasio’s quarry is a cure for cancer.Using Mephisto to illuminate cancercells, De Stasio is examining a new typeof cancer therapy that could virtuallyeliminate the collateral damage thatoccurs from chemotherapy or radiationtreatment. The therapy involves anuclear reaction that causes the equivalentof a tiny atomic bomb to detonateinside each cancer cell.She is collaborating with MineshMehta, a UW Medical School radiationtherapy expert, to perfect the process.A high-energy personality known bynearly everyone as “Pupa,” De Stasioand her graduate students frequentlywork around the clock during thethree-week windows when her project isonline. She’s always on the lookout forgood twenty-four-hour diners.After working for a decade splittingtime among Madison, Rome, andLausanne, Switzerland, De Stasio hascome to appreciate the comparativelystaid faculty life. Her course seemsalmost tailor-made for her: Physicsin the Arts, a highly visual approach tophysics designed for non-majors. Everyclass she teaches comes with a constellationof PowerPoint slides, which usesome of her favorite works of art toillustrate light, perspective, pigment,and other principles.De Stasio says the strategic hiringapproach was ultimately why she choseUW-Madison over another job offer atCalifornia’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory,which wanted her to develop newexperiments for future NASA spacemissions.“It’s a brilliant initiative, especiallythe interdisciplinary approach,” she says.“The more we progress with science, themore there is to do. Whatever is left willrequire the cooperation of specialistsfrom different disciplines.”Faculty attending a noon-hour Chaos and Complex Systems seminar in Chamberlin Halllearn about De Stasio’s research, which, in collaboration with a Medical School colleague,is examining a new type of cancer therapy.SPRING 2001 37

Catalyst forCollaborationThe new hiring approach has triggeredhundreds of faculty collaborations, leadingto knowledge that is wholly originaland often counter-intuitive. Most importantly,it helps faculty who are teachingand researching to a way to betteranticipate the changing needs of society.It’s being held up as a template forthe twenty-first-century university,attracting attention across the country.Donna Shalala, former UW-Madisonchancellor and former U.S. secretary ofHealth and Human Services who is nowthe president of Miami University, callsit the most exciting experiment takingplace in higher education today.“I think this is going to becomepart of the culture here,” says ChancellorJohn Wiley MS’65, PhD’68, who,along with former Chancellor DavidWard MS’62, PhD’63, is the program’sprimary architect. “We initiated this fromthe top down, but it has been sustainedfrom the bottom up. It’s the enthusiasmof the faculty that has kept it going.”Susan Friedman, an English andwomen’s studies professor and one ofthe program’s early participants, saysit is allowing faculty to venture intouncharted intellectual territory. “Insteadof having administrators issue nice ideasabout how departments should hire differentkinds of people,” Friedman says,“there was a carrot there — a big carrot— and that was faculty [positions], aprecious commodity on campus.”During the program’s first threeyears, the university has funded thirtytwocluster hiring proposals, usually withthree or four positions attached. Theybuild their expertise around an intellectualchallenge, a technological opportunity,or an emerging social problem.The proposals reflect a smorgasbordof academic fields. Of those funded sofar, fifteen have their roots in the arts,humanities, or social sciences, while theother seventeen are rooted in the physicalor biological sciences.One new cluster is genomics, whichis helping to glean relevance from theDuring a break between teaching back-to-back classes, De Stasio looks over questions for anupcoming exam with teaching assistant Evelina Tsoncheva outside Sterling Hall.billions of bits of DNA code spinning outof sequencing efforts. Other vital newareas include international public affairsand global cultural affairs, both of whichhave been drastically reshaped by globalization.Another effort centers aroundnanotechnology, the science of rearrangingatoms to construct entirely newmaterials. Other examples includebiotechnology ethics, sustainable landuse, energy sources and policy, and theinformation technology revolution.The program is adding some newstars to UW-Madison’s academic galaxyby attracting people at the pinnacle oftheir fields. David Schwartz, a professorfrom New York University who joinedthe genomics group in 1999, invented atechnology called optical mapping that isnow the gold standard for genomicsresearch worldwide. And psychologyprofessor Mark Seidenberg, recruitedfrom the University of Southern California,is one of the world’s leading scientistsexploring the cognitive roots of language.Linda Greene, associate vice chancellorand the program’s coordinator,says that strategic hiring has probablyinfluenced those already on the facultyeven more than newcomers. “The veryprocess of competing for the clusterhires brings our faculty together towork across departments [and] acrossdisciplines to envision the ways in whichour curriculum and our research can beenriched,” she says.Reloading theFaculty RanksUW-Madison’s strategic hiring opportunitycame on the heels of a decade ofattrition in the faculty ranks, Wiley says.Throughout the 1990s, the universitysimply didn’t have the money to replacefaculty members who were leaving forretirement or outside offers. From 1988to 1998, faculty numbers dropped toabout 2,100, a loss of 250 faculty.Ward, who was chancellor at thetime, and Wiley, who was serving asprovost, recognized that it was imperativeto begin rebuilding the faculty toacceptable levels. They set a goal ofadding approximately 150 faculty. Thequestion was how. Wiley noted that thefaculty losses occurred uniformly acrossnearly every department on campus.Simply doling out new positions, one perdepartment, seemed like squanderingan opportunity.Departments also tend to perpetuatethe status quo by seeking faculty who areapproximate clones of the people theyreplace. “An expert in area A getsreplaced by another expert in area A,”Wiley says. “That’s one of the reasonswhy universities change so slowly.“So what we decided to do,” Wileyexplains, “was throw it wide open to thecampus and ask them: if you had three orfour new positions for one concentrated38 ON WISCONSIN

area, what area do you think would bemost important to focus on?”The idea of a campus competitionwas born, albeit with a modest start. In1998, the university had funding only fora dozen new positions, and most of thosewere cobbled together from existingcollege budgets. But then the idea wasgiven a high-profile break: then GovernorTommy Thompson ’63, JD’66 heardabout the plan and became an instantfan. Wiley was called to Thompson’soffice and was allocated eight new positionsworth $1.5 million — right in themiddle of a budget biennium — to befocused on booming fields in the biosciences.Now, with twenty new positionsand a clear sense of greater publicsupport, the competition got interesting.Today the program has beenextended and will generate as many as125 new positions, thanks primarily tosupport from a four-year plan called theMadison Initiative. Strategic hiring wasone of four initial funding priorities ofthe $97 million initiative, which proposesmatching state money with support fromthe UW Foundation and the WisconsinAlumni Research Foundation.The primary attraction, Wiley says, isnot just gaining a new faculty position. Itis being able to promote a ground swellof new interdisciplinary interests.“The new positions will representonly about 6 percent of our total faculty,”Wiley says, “but this was a way of havinga huge multiplier effect.”A Centuryof TunnelingNone of this crosswiring of disciplineswould be possible, of course, had theacademic department not emerged a centuryago as the dominant structural forcebehind American higher education.Clifton Conrad, a UW-Madison professorof higher education, says departmentswere borrowed from the Germanuniversity model in the mid-1800s. Theyrepresented an entirely new and progressiveapproach to the university: a placethat would provide a core curriculumand a broad range of specialized studies.It’s celebration time for De Stasio, at left, after data suggests a breakthrough in her research at theSynchrotron Radiation Center. She enjoys the moment with Tiziana Parasassi, a colleague from the NationalResearch Council, center, and graduate student Brad Frazer. With its claustrophobic maze of wires andstainless steel chambers, the center is an international destination for hard-core physicists and engineers.Departments would be built around thegoal of advancing knowledge for thegreater good of society.Prior to that time, Conrad says,colleges were based on a rigid medievalstructure. Their purpose was the trainingof “Christian gentlemen,” with a curriculumrooted in the twin pillars of thetrivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic) andthe quadrivium (math, music, geometry,astronomy). Greek and Latin weremandatory, and teaching was entirelybased on recitation and memorization.And for exams, students had to suffer apublic exhibition, during which theywere grilled by the college president,tutors, and other “learned gentlemen.”Students were not entirely thrilledwith this suffocating “collegiate way.”Conrad references the Harvard rebellionof 1823, a spree of rowdyism that endedin the expulsion of forty-three of the university’sseventy students. Interestingly,student literary societies, debate teams,athletic clubs, and other extracurricularpursuits blossomed during this era.After the Civil War and the Land GrantAct of 1862, universitiesbegan to focus outward,toward meeting thenation’s changing needs.Graduate education grewrapidly, and specializedresearch rose in value.Faculty went from beingglorified tutors to “purveyorsof disciplinaryknowledge,” in positionsof high esteem. Conradsays this change triggereda period of rigorous “verticalexpansion” of knowledge— going deeper anddeeper into specializeddisciplines — that existsto this day.Academic departmentsdid great things for educationand for the world,Conrad says. They preparedstudents for anincreasingly complicatedtechnical world, and producedrigorous researchSPRING 2001 39