Thursday, Jan. 22, Director of Communications and Marketing at the College of William and Mary’s School of Computing, Data Sciences and Physics Randy Ready led The Flat Hat and other local publications on a tour of the new Integrated Science Center 4 construction. Ready was joined by Department of Applied Science chair Eric Bradley, who has led the planning of the four ISC phases. This addition is the College’s first new school in over 50 years.
Ready explained that while the building is new to the College, the disciplines being housed there are not.
“While the school itself is new, we have four departments, and they are not new,” Ready said. “So you have computer science, data science, physics and applied science, the four departments. They’ve been around, some of them for a long time — physics like 200 years. So they’re well established.
Ready continued by explaining the layout of ISC 4.
“This building hosts the School of Computing, Data Sciences and Physics Dean’s office, as well as our computer science department, which is kind of split up between this floor and the second floor,” he said. “The data science department is on the third floor.”
Ready went on to highlight the collaboration opportunities within the new school.
“It’s just been an opportunity to bring in a lot of the science departments or other departments under one building versus kind of spread out throughout campus,” he said. “And that really helps bring in the interdisciplinary part of it and collaboration versus the stove pipes, or, you know, trying to create more opportunities for that interdisciplinary research and learning, which is a big thing here at William and Mary.”
Bradley noted the reason for the new construction in relation to this interdisciplinary learning goal.
“We just can’t do STEM at all, no matter where it is, or any of the social sciences, and even some of the humanities, without a fair amount of interface with big data and computation,” he said. “Digital humanities is a real thing, and it’s actually very, very important. So, to accommodate that growing demand and trying to stay ahead of the curve for training our undergraduate students to take a place, our new provost decided that we would try to center the people who do really computationally heavy material together in an integrated system.”
He continued to reflect on the goals for this collaborative STEM building, emphasizing the vision of the College’s science disciplines all under one roof.
“This notion of integration is a non-trivial thing,” Bradley said. “This is really important. We found too much ‘siloing’ in the past, and that’s university-wide, but also U.S.-wide. Buildings with people in them that don’t walk across campus to interact in a way that is meaningful because it’s too much work. So the idea was here to try to integrate most of STEM.”
While there were some challenges to this integration, Bradley depicted how this was still an improvement for the College.
“Now, there’s some STEM that couldn’t integrate because of the facilities,” Bradley said. “So geology is not in here, and physics is across the quad from us because of its size and the magnitude of it. But everything else has been now, with this building, truly integrated. So, except for having to get up from your desk, all you have to do is walk someplace within this four-building facility, and we’re really finally having this objective of integration that has been a transition over many years.”
The tour moved to assistant professor of applied science Geoffrey Zahn’s wet lab. He introduced his TIDAL research lab’s efforts in genomic data science, working with microbiomes.
“We try to design microbial communities that make plants healthier,” Zahn said. “We could do it for humans, but we need a med school and a lot of paperwork. And so if we can learn it in plants, we can actually transfer what we learn to any of the programs in there. This room is all about kind of the molecular side of things, and growing bacteria and fungi, and then extracting their DNA to get genomes, which we upload to the supercomputer and analyze from our bedrooms or wherever we are, so this is kind of the wet lab space.”
Zahn continued to introduce the lab space and what opportunities it opens for him and his researchers.
“I can’t do anything in my research without this space,” he said. “So we can go and use other people’s data, the genomes that already exist online, but all of those are kind of old news. So we’re discovering new fungi in the ocean, for example, there’s a brand new genome species that has never been described by science. I’m trying to figure out what proteins they’re making, what cool biological technology you can get from them. We have to have this space for that; it’s a requirement.”
Professor of applied science Margaret Saha explained the benefits of the new lab space that will house her International Genetically Engineered Machine and Phage undergraduate research teams.
“It’s really cool to be in this building because half of our work is bioinformatics, data science and computer science,” Saha said. “And now with the AI tools that are available, we have two floors of experts here who are able to help with this and help us collaborate. We, who do all the wet lab work and the sequencing, could do amazing things and discover patterns in biological data so much more easily and quickly, accurately and effectively. So when I hear the words AI, I don’t think, ‘Oh my god, we’re losing our society, undergraduates won’t learn how to write or think.’ I think, ‘Wow, look at what we could do with this to solve problems in our environment, and to address human health.’”
Kate Carline ’26, an undergraduate researcher in Saha’s lab, explained her connection to the College’s science programs.
“I’ve really been able to grow in this lab,” Carline said. “And I think it started with Phage Lab because we have that double — if you do the wet lab in the fall and the bioinformatics in the spring, but then also at iGEM, it’s like [Saha] always picks a really great team where everyone has totally different backgrounds and interests. So you end up learning a lot from the students around you, and I think that’s a sort of invaluable experience you get from the lab here. I’m really excited, actually, now that we’re in the applied science space, because I think we’ll get that interdisciplinary sense even more in this building.”
The second and third floors of the building support the data sciences and computer science departments. There are 35 computer labs, called dry labs, on these floors to sustain these disciplines.
Ready outlined the funding that the School of Computing, Data Sciences and Physics receives each year.
“The school, not all William and Mary, but just our four departments, brings in a little over $10 million each year in external funds for research,” he said. “A lot of that is from the Department of Energy with physics, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense [and the] National Institutes of Health. So a lot of that external funding that comes in for research and it’s hitting a lot of our departments for sure.”
Bradley continued to outline the novelties of the building and what it offers to students. One of the new spaces is an interactive classroom with grouped tables instead of a lecture hall setup.
“This is our first interactive classroom that was on campus, and we hope that more and more faculty will engage in that type of teaching,” he said. “If you remember when you were students, you probably showed up unprepared for the topic, and you listened and you wrote stuff down. And then, hopefully at some point in time, you went back over and studied and got ready for a test. The flip part of this type of interacting thing is that you come prepared. You’ve already listened to the thing. You’ve already read the assignment. You come, and then you do it here. And if you’re not doing it, you’re not going to get the grade that you want.”
Bradley cited the improved quality of learning that he expects with these classroom formats.
“It’s a much more effective way of teaching, particularly in STEM, where if you don’t understand the basics, you don’t understand the terminology, it’s pretty hard to understand the concept,” Bradler said. “So this is really a breakthrough for us in the STEM disciplines to have this.”
The ground floor houses the Applied Research Center, where primarily graduate students and undergraduate summer interns will continue their research using the advanced technology in this new space.
Bradley commented on the goals for this new research center.
“This is where we’re going to be doing lots of development of things that have proprietary interest,” he said. “So in other words, we’re going to be developing things that we could patent, not only finding solutions to problems.”
Bradley explained further who the proprietors are and what type of work is being done.
“There’s a lot of work going on now for both the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy, making new materials that will hold charges for a long time, in other words: improving batteries, as an example — materials that will hold up in space in a better way,” Bradley said. “A lot of our collaboration historically has been with [the National Aeronautics and Space Administration] Langley. We hope to continue with that.”
The remainder of the ground floor includes a 152-student lecture hall, a high-performance computing center that will be highly restricted due to collaborations with the Department of Defense, and lab space dedicated to the new bioengineering major, whose confirmation is still pending a board of visitors vote.
The Makerspace was the tour’s final destination. Spanning 8,000 square feet, the collaborative center includes sewing machines, welding rooms, spray paint studios and 3D printers.
Makerspace director Jonathan Frey detailed the space’s layout.
“This area here will be a design studio, so there’ll be a dozen or so of those wood top benches out here, and that’s where we’ll have small hand tools, portable machines like sewing machines, things of that nature,” he said. “And then as we go down the line, we have a laser-cutting facility down there, a hot work room for welding, plasma-cutting, kiln works, things like that, a metal shop, a wood shop. 3D printing and electronics in the next room down, and then a walk-in spray booth.”
Frey continued by speaking about the goals for the space.
“And the goal is not to get students to be experts,” Frey said. “It’s about how to use it without hurting themselves and without hurting the equipment, so that they can get the experience and carry that into whatever field they’re in.”
He expanded on the Makerspace’s potential impact on the community.
“The goal is to eventually have summer programs for all ages, have winter programs, to open it up and really get the programming established and out there,” Frey said. “And then maybe even follow through on a lofty goal that I have, which is to sync up the entire peninsula from us up to Charlottesville. There should be a corridor of hands-on experiential stuff that is synchronized.”
Bradley concluded with a look into his ISC4 planning process, mentioning the goals he dreamed of achieving in this collaborative building.
“We just can’t operate out of silos anymore,” he said. “The disciplines are so integrated now, that’s where the true innovation and discovery is going to happen — about those intersections of disciplines. And we know that a facility that supports that makes it happen faster and maybe even of a higher quality. So that’s part of the reason we’ve invested in building, is to make what we’ve been doing, what most universities are doing, but we’re trying to make it even easier and faster, and high quality.”
