Janelia Farm is a research campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute that opened in October 2006. The campus is located in Loudoun County, Virginia, near the town of Ashburn.
The 689 acres (2.79 km2) campus features a 900-foot (270 m) long, arc-shaped main building—designed by noted architect Rafael Viñoly— known as the Landscape Building. The building, 270 feet (82 m) deep at the ground floor, is built into a hill and designed to be the primary research facility. Comprehensive enhancements to the larger campus by landscape architectural firm Lewis Scully Gionet, Inc. were completed in fall 2008. Work includes hardscape elements (an architectural water feature, expanded path network, and siting of multiple pieces of artwork, among others) and comprehensive planting additions. Work was constructed by Ruppert Nurseries. In 2008 Lewis Scully Gionet, Inc won an Honor Award from the Maryland and Potomac chapters of the American Society of Landscape Architects for their work at Janelia Farm.
The campus research focuses on interdisciplinary biomedical research in neurobiology, specifically addressing:
- The identification of general principles that govern how information is processed by neuronal circuits
- The development of imaging technologies and computational methods for image analysis
Janelia farm was designed to emulate the unconstrained and collaborative environments at AT&T Bell Laboratories and Cambridge's Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Researchers are on six-year contracts and fully internally funded, independent of traditional research grant funding.
Gerald M. Rubin is the first director of Janelia Farm, and saw it from concept through construction to operation.
References
- "Neurobiology on the Farm", Science 8 December 2006: Vol. 314. no. 5805, pp. 1530 – 1532
External links
- Janelia Farm page at Howard Hughes Medical Institute website
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