Dartmouth's Center for Cognitive and Educational Neuroscience will lose most of its $21.8 million grant from the National Science Foundation and close after two of the Center's five principal researchers left the project.
In April 2005, the National Science Foundation awarded Dartmouth what was the biggest peer-reviewed grant ever received by the College to establish and sustain the Center. Under the direction of now-former Dartmouth professor Michael Gazzaniga, the Center was to be a pioneer in bringing together the fields of cognitive neuroscience and education, but now the NSF plans to cut off what was to be a five-year grant about a year after its inception.
The NSF granted this award to Dartmouth as part of a cooperative agreement stipulating that a favorable site review each year was required for continued funding. The grant was different from most in that the NSF saw itself as a collaborator with Dartmouth and not just a provider of money, according to Associate Dean of the Faculty for the Social Sciences Michael Mastanduno.
As part of the agreement, an independent team of experts conducted its first annual site review in February and recommended to the NSF that funding be discontinued due to "fundamental differences between the College and NSF on how the work of the Center should be approached," according to a College statement.
After the recommendation, the NSF gave the Center 45 days to respond. The members of the Center then submitted a proposal to "phase out" the CCEN by the end of 2006, and the Center is now working with the NSF to orchestrate its conclusion. So far, the Center has received a little more than $4 million of the grant's total sum.
Gazzaniga, former Dean of the Faculty at the College, resigned his position as a Distinguished University Professor in the fall of 2005 to run an interdisciplinary study of the mind at the University of California, Santa-Barbara. When he left, he said that he was still planning to continue some work with the Center both from across the country and on trips back to Dartmouth.
At the time, the chairman of the UCSB psychology department James Blascovich said that Gazzaniga wanted to stay at Dartmouth through last fall "to make sure that the programs he had started for Dartmouth would remain home, even if he left. That's really important to him."
The CCEN's other major loss was that of Laura-Ann Petitto, chairwoman of Dartmouth's education department, who still teaches at Dartmouth, but left the Center for undisclosed reasons.
"I think what was unfortunate for Dartmouth in this case was the timing, with two key players leaving very early in the process," Mastanduno said. "That particular timing led the NSF to question whether [the Center] would function the way they wanted it to."
Gazzaniga could not be reached for comment on the issue and Petitto refused to comment, saying that she was not permitted to do so. The Center's other three principal investigators are director of the Functional Brain and Imaging Center Scott Grafton, education professor Kevin Dunbar and psychological and brain sciences professor Todd Heatherton.
According to Dartmouth's statement, the College will continue with many of the projects already underway that do not require the existence of the Center, but will have to abandon many of those that need the CCEN in order to be carried out.
"A lot of the work that was to be done still is to be done," Mastanduno said.
