UVA School of Medicine

"I have a much broader view of the impact science can have on the world now." –NATHANIEL CHRISTY talking to them about what interests you." Making it easy to run into colleagues post-doctoral fellow Tania Thomas, MD of the weekly infectious disease lab meetings. In these gatherings of grad students, post docs and principal investigators, clinicians and basic scientists, even undergraduates do- ing research internships during the summer, Thomas has gleaned ideas that she can adapt to her own work with tuberculosis in pediat- ric populations in the developing world. Although Thomas has never worked with diarrheal disease, she has also been able to dovetail with Petri's projects to develop in- vestigations involving TB. And she's taken ideas from other researchers—Becca Dilling- ham's project in which she used cell phone reminders to improve medication adherence in patients with HIV, for example—to con- sider their applications with her TB project in Tanzania. "Those are things that I really wouldn't have thought of if I wasn't around these peo- ple on a daily basis," Thomas said. "It's seeing what has worked [with other projects] and adapting it to a pediatric cohort." SERENDIPITY BY DESIGN "Those are formal ways that people interact, but there's a lot to be said for the informal nature of things, too," Petri said, highlight- ing perhaps the most overlooked aspect of a building's design. "Even in the era of the internet where you can collaborate with ev- eryone anywhere in the world, there's still no substitute for sitting in someone's office and 32 Vitals Fall 2011 unexpectedly was one of the most impor- tant features that all three program leaders wanted to ensure in Carter-Harrison's design. Laboratory space is open, with direct access, in some cases, between different investiga- tors' labs. Some PIs, such as Petri and Braci- ale, have offices inside their lab space where they are easily available for unplanned con- sultation. And each floor has a kind of village square: a break area with a coffee pot (on the third floor there are cupcakes on Mon- days, too) where people naturally gather and, while they're at it, talk about their latest discovery or a glitch that's hanging things up. "These physical adjacencies help to create an information flow that occurs more fac- ilely," Weber said. And while it wasn't part of the faculty's design initiatives, he quipped, "[The building] also has the slowest elevators on the planet, so when you're on the eleva- tor with someone you have ample oppor- tunity to expound and to hear new things." DIVERSITY AND DOLLARS Petri and Weber also think Carter-Harrison's diversity of ideas and ready access to expert insight inspire more than better science. "It's not a requirement for an NIH re- search grant to be interdisciplinary, but quite often those are the strongest [applications]," Petri said. A grant that he's writing now, for example, involves clinical investigators in Bangladesh, an expert on the microbiome, a genetic epidemiologist and a cellular im- munologist. "It's a team of people, each of whom brings something unique to the proj- ect. The more that we can do that, the more competitive our work is." This approach appears to be working. Since moving into Carter-Harrison, grant funding for the Division of Infectious Dis- ease has more than doubled. This year, re- search funding for the division is around $24 million. Petri believes at least part of this funding success is related to the collegial environ- ment of Carter-Harrison. "A lot of it is the young people you recruit, the post doctoral fellows and graduate students," he said. "So often they are the ones making the discover- ies that are driving this big research portfolio. When you bring someone to the University of Virginia for an interview and they see these beautiful labs where everybody inter- acts, that's huge for recruitment." It's huge for retention, too. According to Petri, a number of junior faculty members have been offered leadership positions at other major universities. Many of these indi- viduals have decided to stay, in part because they value the environment of Carter-Harri- son. And for junior faculty members, much of what they value is having such ready ac- cess to intellectual resources and mentors. Assistant professor of infectious disease Christopher Moore, MD, for example, is working on a clinical project in Uganda look- ing at individuals with AIDS who die from bacterial sepsis. He is also doing basic re- search in mouse models to understand how natural killer [NK] cells are involved in the immune response to sepsis. Right across the hall from him is the lab of Associate Profes- sor Michael Brown, PhD, an immunologist who is an expert on NK cell research. "It's a great opportunity for a young researcher to be able to walk across the hall and talk with one of the world's leading experts in his area of investigation," Petri said. For grad student Christy, the opportuni- ties that are so readily available in Carter- Harrison have changed the way he sees science. When he joined Petri's lab, he was very focused on bench work. After taking advantage of an opportunity to test a clini- cal diagnostic tool overseas, however, he's rethinking his career goals. "I have a much broader view of the im- pact science can have on the world now," he said. "I like bench top science, but sometimes when you're focused so specifically on the little problem in the lab, it can be hard to remember the broad scope of what you're doing and why. When I was in Dhaka [Ban- gladesh], I got to see what malnutrition does to your physical and mental state. I don't think I would have gotten that kind of exposure in lots of the other labs."

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