My pat answer is mathematics (the universal language), biology (in order to master non-linear, dynamic thinking especially related to complex systems and ecosystemic issues) and Chinese (since in 10 years Chinese will be even more important than it is today in both the commercial and scientific domains).

But let’s peek around the corner. Both design and the arts are going to become increasingly important. Why? First we must crack the problems of our lives being flooded by junk. We need to better understand the design ethos of ‘elegant minimalism’ and then we need to master the art of the sketch where hand and mind merge to expand our imagination. Imagination will soon count more than creativity, if it doesn’t already, because there is no deep reason to be creative if we can’t first imagine new worlds to create or enact.

But in addition, as complexity increases, our ability to communicate the complex in simple, authentic terms will become increasingly important in order to mobilize collective action. The ability to create sketches or other forms of visualization that evoke understanding and help coordinate action will be priceless.

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More than anything, they should be studying math, including statistics and probability, and programming. No matter what the subject, we will have huge amounts of data about it, and will need these tools to get meaning from the data. The areas I’m thinking of include medicine, genetics, nutrition, and neuroscience; human behavior; energy management and consumption; materials science (so that we can use our personal 3D printers more effectively); aerospace and cosmology (so we can find asteroids, whether to deflect them from an earth-bound path, to mine them of valuable minerals or terraform them for human habitation); and of course biology, so that we can enjoy the company of animals, grow food, and ultimately create human-friendly living conditions on other planets and asteroids. It would also be great to get better at modeling and managing economic fluctuations!

But in the meantime, don’t forget to read world literature so you can understand your place in history and know how to be a human being.

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The world is only going to become more technological and more global in the next decade. Students should be getting a solid enough grounding in mathematics, probabilistic thinking, physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering that they understand these ways of thinking and the values of these fields. They also need a liberal arts grounding and, particularly, well developed verbal and writing skills.

Finally, they need enough experience with the rest of the world that they are comfortable interacting with people who come from different cultures and in foreign venues. A foreign language is often a very valuable asset and for people who have backgrounds in multiple cultures—learning the languages of their parents can be an extremely effective preparation for a global career.

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The impact of information-based technologies will continue to grow—probably at an accelerating rate. In nearly every segment of society, we see both quality and productivity improvements because of increased use of automation and digital communication. The impact is obviously huge in some sectors such as finance and publishing. And it will only grow in the laggards, such as education and healthcare, despite the immense challenges due to inertia, privacy, and access.

There will be great change in smaller areas also. I was just reading a journal on digital archaeology, to which I hadn’t previously given much thought, and I was astounded by the role information technology can play. As another somewhat less common application of information technology, Google has sponsored significant Research in the Digital Humanities (using statistical data from our large Books corpus), with the promise of proving entirely new research paradigms. (See Culturomics 2.0 for more.) Finally, the mobile application stores are filled with a surprising variety of applications in a variety of domains, where we might not have thought information technology could play a role.

So, this leads to a natural implication for students: Make sure you deeply understand information technology. This doesn’t mean just understanding how to use a search engine or a word processor. It doesn’t mean that you have spent years playing computer games or using social networks. It means instead developing an understanding of the basics of computer science (which includes at least some programming in a programming language of your choice). It means also that, that no matter what your field of study, you should focus on learning where computer science will hybridize with it to produce great progress. For many years, I’ve argued that the action in most disciplines, X, will be at the front line where computer science meets that discipline: In short-hand CS + X, for all X.

For at least another 50 years, the greatest intellectual challenges and economic value will arise from the hybridization of disciplines. So, by all means follow your passions: study biology, philosophy, medicine, education, economics, music, etc. But combine that study with a healthy portion of computer science.

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First of all, students should be studying what they are passionate about. Clearly, computer science will continue to spread into all aspects of human life. Within computer science, I believe machine learning and AI are perhaps the biggest study opportunity today. Biology and medicine are also undergoing vast changes. Personalized medicine will become a big issue; the understanding of the human genome and cell chemistry will open up entire new opportunities for innovation. So any study in the area of life sciences that connects to those new opportunities will be important. The will be amazing bioengineering opportunities, e.g., by developing materials and systems that connect with human tissue. Nanotechnology will become a major driver of new technologies in the future, with tons of great things to study at the intersection of new materials and human life.

I also believe some of the mundane aspects are ripe for overhaul, such as transportation and manufacturing. Studying robotics, rapid prototyping, autonomy in fields such as Aero-Astro, mechanical engineering, or computer science, should position students today to become the technology leaders of tomorrow. For students studying in humanities, I urge them to connect to the digital revolution that is unfolding right now. I am less excited about studying finance, since too many of us are already too creative in inventing new financial instruments that make society less stable.

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I think learning the fundamentals of a discipline is the most important thing that students can do to prepare themselves for jobs both today and tomorrow. That discipline may be biology, bioengineering, chemistry, chemical engineering or others. I also think doing research is great preparatory experience. Furthermore, I believe the opportunities offered by the convergence between biology, medicine, and engineering are rapidly increasing.

Thus, courses and research at this interface may be increasingly attractive. At MIT, for example, training at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research or the Broad Institute or the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Program may be very helpful. At many universities, there are also special programs or activities that students can be involved in that may be useful. At MIT such programs include the $100K business plan competition. At Stanford they have a Biodesign Program. Finally, summer jobs in companies involved in biotech or pharma or medical devices can offer great experiences.

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Liberal science and technology. We need a new major that prepares the future workforce for constant change by teaching broad-based knowledge in many disciplines. This major would consist of, among other disciplines, the basics of engineering, biology, chemistry, physics, law, business, humanities and communications. This curriculum should be group-based, where students teach each other, which is how the most successful corporate teams function—from design to product launch. The rate of change will demand workers who can easily recognize and accept the rapid evolution of science and technology.

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Biology 101 and beyond. I would take as much biology as possible, it’s exploding and changing faster than anyone could have expected. Especially our understanding of the “central dogma” itself, where RNA is playing a more critical role than ever thought before. WOW!

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College undergraduates today are faced with many choices of where to concentrate their studies. It is important to look down the road to determine where the major unmet needs of society will be. The healthcare industry offers many opportunities and challenges over the coming decades. As I look to the future of healthcare, there are several trends emerging which might help direct those especially interested in this field.

The most obvious trend is that the population of the United States and around the world is aging. The need to develop new drugs, technologies, devices and services to deal with this demographic shift will benefit those who have chosen careers in innovative fields to address this problem. Experience in chemistry, biology, applied mathematics, statistics, and biomedical engineering are all skills which will be in high demand. As medicine becomes more personalized—as each person gets diagnosed and treated based on their genetic make-up—new technologies will develop in conjunction with the computer science field.

The healthcare industry is also a global market. In addition to our aging population, hundreds of millions of people in developing countries will enter the middle class in the coming years. For example, more people will enter the middle class in China in the near future than the entire population of the U.S. A facility with the language and an understanding of the cultures of countries now making up the global economy will also be useful.

Healthcare will clearly play a bigger role in the global economy in the decades ahead. Innovation will be key to offer more effective, cost-effective cures and treatments for unmet needs. Hopefully, students will take advantage of their universities offerings across various disciplines to gain a broad, worldly education. And that their choice of concentration will lead toward new innovations which can lead to the betterment of the human condition.

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According to the National Science Foundation, eighth grade girls are half as likely to be interested in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) careers as boys—a dramatic change from second grade, where the numbers are roughly equal. This trend continues through high school, college and into the workplace, as even women with advanced science degrees tend to leave the field at higher rates than their male counterparts. The numbers also show that careers of men and women in bioscience progress at markedly different rates; while women and men each hold about half of the graduate degrees in biology, far more senior leadership roles are held by men than women (17 percent vs. 83 percent, respectively.)

Women In Bio Greater Boston (WIB-GB) is one group that is trying to change that. It is the newest chapter of a fast-growing international trade association aimed at fostering leadership, entrepreneurship and careers of women in the biosciences. Comprised of professionals across the career continuum—from those just starting out to industry veterans—the group plans to leverage the region’s strong biotechnology supercluster to provide career development opportunities for women in New England. Programming being planned for 2012 includes networking, mentoring and educational events specifically geared at the interests of and challenges faced by women working in this industry.

Similar WIB chapters in Washington, DC/Baltimore, Research Triangle Park, Seattle and Chicago are enjoying enthusiastic participation in both social and career-enhancing programs, such as an expert lecture on IP in Chicago and a national team entry in the Walk for the Cure in DC. In addition, Washington/Baltimore, RTP, and now Boston have organized a special series aimed at young girls interested in science, called Young Women In Bio (YWIB).

As part of the YWIB series, Biogen Idec opened its doors as host to 25 curious middle school girls from across Massachusetts on December 1. It was an educational, fun program designed to provide the students with first-hand knowledge of the biotechnology and life sciences industry. Nadine Cohen, Biogen’s senior vice president of regulatory affairs, provided a welcome and an overview of the company, biotechnology, and the field’s range of career paths. Community lab director Tracy Callahan, and lab manager Jennifer Greenberg took the visitors on a site tour, engaged them in a hands-on lab experiment (involving M&Ms!), and visited the purification lab to share information about the crucial assays used in biotechnology. A shadow experience demonstrated a “day in the life” of several Biogen employees. Scientist mentors led the visitors to their individual work areas as they explained their roles, shared how they became interested in science, displayed and explained a variety of lab equipment, and answered insightful questions from the inquisitive young ladies.

Lisa Geller, program chair of the Women in Bio Greater Boston chapter, explained why the group is spearheading these events. “As successful women who are passionate about working in the biotechnology industry, we hope to fuel a similar interest in the next generation of female scientists and business leaders. We hope that our Young Women In Bio program blossoms into an ongoing series for girls from early middle school into high school to continue keep them interested as they get older.”

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MIT is looking to throw a party this September, but it’s not just all fun and games (more on that later). The innovation community has already been buzzing a bit about this one, called t=0.

The idea for the festival is “to encourage students to start something that is big and world changing,” says Dharmishta Rood, the festival co-director.

Now, I was never under the impression that MIT students had much trouble doing that as it is, but the aim is to get students plugged into the opportunities for entrepreneurship at MIT as early as possible in their academic careers, say Rood and festival co-director Elliot Cohen.

There’s really no shortage of different industry conferences and startup-focused events throughout MIT and Cambridge, but t=0—which starts the evening of Friday, September 16, and concludes the evening of Sunday, September 18—is looking to break the mold.

“We’re definitely going for a real true festival feel,” says Rood.

For one thing, rather than using the businessy term “keynoters” to describe Lotus Development and Electronic Frontier Foundation founder Mitch Kapor (who is kicking off the event) and TechStars and Foundry Group co-founder Brad Feld (who’s wrapping it up via Skype on Sunday), t=0 is just referring to them as opening and closing “artists.” There’s also going to be a bouncy house—yes, like what you see at carnivals. And you can expect to see “a lot more hands-on doing and making than at other types of events like conferences,” says Rood.

T=0 is largely targeted at students and is free for the MIT student body. MIT students can each invite a person of their choice to get a $20 ticket and some non-MIT students can also attend for $20 tickets each. There will also be a limited number of tickets available for companies to purchase (e-mail conference organizers for those). The aim is to have between 1,000 and 1,200 attendees floating in and out over the weekend and to attract students from across different schools within the university. T=0—an engineering term usually used to signify the time at the beginning of experiment—is used as the event name to encourage students to get involved in entrepreneurship at the beginning of their MIT careers—or at least the beginning of 2011.

” We want to create opportunities for students of different disciplines to interact with each other in different ways,” says Cohen. “We want to make it an event with something genuinely interesting and unique for everyone.”

The three main elements of the festival are the “artists”(speakers like Kapor, Feld, and a couple dozen more artists, a “maker space” for rapid prototyping workshops (in areas from software to physical products), and a weekend-long hackathon across different disciplines. Saturday night will also feature demos by MIT companies that are already underway.

Other speakers include Locately co-founder and CTO Drew Volpe, Frederic Lalonde (an Expedia veteran now CEO of travel startup Hopper), Apricot Capital founding partner Jennifer Lum, Catharine Havasi of the MIT Media Lab, Box.net engineering manager Jeff Seibert, HubSpot CEO and founder Brian Halligan, and Eric Paley of Founder Collective. An exact schedule of formats and talks isn’t yet available, but speakers have been given two requirements for their talks: it has to be “extremely energetic and exactly what they would want to communicate to the students,” says Cohen.

Most of the festivities will take place on campus at MIT’s Zesiger Center, whose auditorium will be “radically transformed,” Cohen says. Organizations like the MIT $100K, Artisan’s Asylum, Sprout, Skillshare, the Deshpande Center, and Venture Café are partnering with the MIT students in putting together and promoting the event.

T=0 is being held in September in order to get students excited early on in the academic year. But there’s a bit more to it. Greg mentioned in his first piece on t=0 that Kendall’s Entrepreneurial Walk of Fame is slated to launch that weekend. Cohen tells me there was an aim to coordinate the two events.

“We wanted to be able to create a collection of entrepreneurially related events at the same time,” he says.

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[This post also appears on OVP's blog---Eds.] The University of Washington’s Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) department’s Affiliates day is one of the most fun and rewarding days of the year for me as venture investor and geek. It involves a showcase of projects and research areas by professors and students and is a festival of creativity, new ideas, and engaged smart people. It is a day my colleagues and I look forward to every year.

Last Thursday’s meeting ended with a panel on “The Changing Face of Venture Capital” moderated by UW’s Ed Lazowska, who prompted us with a series of provocative questions. On the panel with me were Greg Gottesman of Madrona Venture Group, Ron Howell of WRF Capital, Bill McAleer of Voyager Capital, and Cam Myhrvold of Ignition Partners.

One of the first topics was the impact of the recession on startups and venture capital. Most VCs expressed the opinion that money was harder to find but that if you could get funded, it was a great time to start a company because skilled people were available, cloud computing providers such as Amazon have made it possible to do with less capital, and there were fewer competitors being funded. There was recognition that it has to be done with less, given the exit markets. But if anything, Greg Gottesman said Madrona is sticking to its model and not changing given a one-year blip.

Cam Myhrvold made the point that there were a lot of entrepreneurs using Amazon Web Services and open source to quickly bootstrap companies with much less capital than prior years. My comment was that if you play at the application layer using open source and AWS, you better think hard about marketing and customer knowledge since there are few technical barriers to entry.

One topic that was raised was why should entrepreneurs go for VCs over angels, money aside. I disagreed that money could be ignored and said that the quality of money was critical in these times. The recession has meant that almost all companies have needed more cash and, given that outside funding is tough, insiders had to step up. Many investors have not stepped up, which has made all VCs more conscious of the quality of their co-investors.

Ed asked what areas were particularly attractive for Seattle, and we got a consistent set of answers. Digital media, gaming, software, and the emerging areas of IT applied to green tech and IT applied to biology are core areas of interest. Each firm had its own areas of interest—for instance, Bill McAleer liked mobile apps and the application of social networks to the enterprise as one of his areas. Bill related a story from a recent trip to NYC where the cab driver was touting his favorite iPhone app—a map of all the public bathrooms. When asked about really innovative new ideas, Greg Gottesman mentioned 3-D printers and how his son was willing to empty his bank account to get one.

At OVP, we like the investment thesis that green tech and biology are becoming more compute-intensive, and that companies that can bring a view of IT applied to these areas are particularly attractive.

My conclusion from the evening is that Seattle is a great place for innovation and has a set of dedicated VCs who want to see a vibrant, risk-taking community. Each firm had its own areas of focus, some overlapping, but all were focused on creating great companies and skilled entrepreneurs here in Seattle. I left feeling that we were lucky to have UW CSE, a great research department generating innovative ideas, and a VC community very committed to fostering growth.

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After 16 months in business, Xconomy has published about 3,400 pages of articles. At this pace, we’ll get to 1.8 million pages in about 700 years. But the Encyclopedia of Life—a new scientific and educational website that will have one page for every species on the planet—intends to hit that number in just 10 years. And even then, it will only be getting started: while biologists have named, described, and catalogued some 1.8 million critters, they estimate that another 8 million species of plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, protists, viruses, and archaea remain undiscovered.

That’s a seriously big website. We’re talking Wikipedia big. (The famous free online encyclopedia, begun in 2000, has 2.6 million articles in English alone, and over 10 million all told.) Which means the organizers of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL for short) are going to have to throw out the old playbook in taxonomy—the slow and meticulous science of species classification, born 250 years ago this year with the publication of Karl Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae—and turn to the techniques of Web 2.0.

Specifically, they’re going to have to rely on thousands of amateur naturalists to collect and submit data for the encyclopedia. But that creates a fascinating problem: How do you partake of the revolution in “user-generated content,” as Wikipedia has done, while keeping the material you publish wholly factual and stable—as it ought to be if the Encyclopedia of Life is to be a useful resource for scientists, students, and policy makers, and as Wikipedia manifestly is not? I’ve been reading up on the EOL project this week, and as far as I can tell, the organizers haven’t yet worked out a thorough answer to that question.

Of course, not all of the material in EOL will be user-generated. A big part of the concept for the encyclopedia, a $40 million project funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, is that it will be a classic Web 2.0 “mashup.” You’re probably familiar with RSS news readers, which assemble headlines and stories from hundreds of separate websites; in a similar way, EOL will use Web-based aggregation technology under development at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA, to suck in and recompile information from existing online species databases, such as the uBio NameBank, iSpecies, FishBase, AmphibiaWeb, and North American Mammals.

Another big part of EOL involves digitizing millions of print books and journal articles in 10 of the world’s leading natural history libraries, including the Harvard University Botany Libraries and the Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology here in Cambridge (the full list is here). The hope is that once this information has been scanned, run through optical-character recognition software, and automatically tagged with the appropriate metadata, it will be possible to access passages from the scientific literature from the relevant species pages in EOL. Say you’re researching Nicrophorus americanus, the American Burying Beetle—a colorful but critically endangered species for which there’s already a very nice page at EOL. The encyclopedia may lead you to, among other resources, a detailed description published in the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia in 1853.

The problem is that scanning, classifying, editing, and mashing together all of that material is going to take years, especially given that it’s all being done on the cheap (EOL and digitization partner, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, have nothing like the amount of money Google is spending on its Book Search project). But “EOL must show some results and value quickly” if it is to be taken seriously by scientists, funders, and the public at large, as the project’s own planning documents acknowledge.

It’s hard to see how the current plan, spelled out in the planning documents and the project’s FAQ page, will accomplish that. Each species page is to have a volunteer “curator,” a competent scientist responsible for authenticating information submitted by contributors before it’s published. Unfortunately, the world population of trained taxonomists is only about 6,000, according to E. O. Wilson, the famed Harvard biologist who conceived EOL and is the project’s honorary chairman. So if you left the curating to the real experts, they’d each have … Next Page »

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(A commencement address to graduates of Eberly College of Science, Penn State University, delivered on May 17, 2008)

It is an honor to be asked to address you on this wonderful day of promise for an exciting future. As a Professor for the past 35 years, I understand the important achievement this day represents for this graduating class of Eberly College of Science. Led by a dedicated faculty, you have worked hard for four years and now are leaving this nurturing place for new challenges. This is fortunate, as the country intensely needs new graduates in science and mathematics. We are faced with major challenges about energy and the environment, continued advances in healthcare and its availability, and the increasing international interdependence of the world’s economies and wellbeing that only young people with your talents and training can surmount.

I do not want to give you the impression that you are through learning. You have just attained the tools to begin to learn. Almost all of the knowledge you use throughout your life, you will learn on your own in the future. Whether this occurs in graduate or professional schools or out in the marketplace, you will have to continue to acquire new knowledge and skills. Finding environments that provide opportunities and people who stimulate these learning processes is a major part of decision-making in your immediate future.

Over 40 years ago, I stood in a similar position as you are standing today. I had just obtained my PhD degree in theoretical chemistry from the University of Illinois and was faced with a career decision. I decided, after reading many journals and textbooks, that I wanted to become a scientist studying the then-new field of molecular biology. I had essentially no training in biology, but I did find a mentor at Caltech, Professor Norman Davidson, who was also making the transition from chemistry to molecular biology—and in that environment, I was able to rapidly learn the essentials. Since then, I have done research in cancer biology, virology, cell biology, immunology, and RNA chemistry, not to mention interactions with biotechnology and pharmaceuticals. In each of these cases, I had to again become a student, learning the essentials of the new field. There is nothing I enjoy more than learning something new and sharing this new knowledge with colleagues. When people ask me about the secret to my success, I answer that it is my curiosity that drives me to learn something new and use this knowledge to create something useful.

You are at a transition where decisions that influence the course of your career are about to be made. I have been advising students at MIT for many years, and each coming year seniors wander into my office seeking advice about possible career paths. We talk about possibilities. but I make it a rule not to ever strongly influence their decision on career choices. This decision has to be their own. I believe young students have a more valid vision of the future than I do. This philosophy, from the perspective of the student, is similar to a popular reframe during the 1960s: “never trust anyone over thirty with important decisions about your life.”

However, there is one aspect about the future that I do emphasize. Most people, particularly young people, underestimate the rate of change of society and science that will occur over the course of their career. Thus, in face of this uncertainty, how can one try to make wise decisions? The answer is that though the rate of change may be difficult to judge, you probably can see the major forces that will drive change globally over the next decades. These include the challenges mentioned above—increasing cost of energy, climate change, increasing demands for medical care—but I would add to these the rapid advances in technology and science, and particularly life sciences. These forces are important to recognize since they indicate where change will occur, and wherever there is “change” there is the opportunity to become the leader of this change.

As a means of illustrating the rate of change in science and technology, it is interesting to remember that a little over 50 years ago, Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA, thus founding the field of molecular biology. Thirty years ago, we discovered how to synthesize new genes and use recombinant DNA to engineer organisms that could produce human insulin and other pharmaceuticals. A great alumnus of Penn State, and a personal friend, Professor Paul Berg of Stanford University, largely led this advancement in science. I had the pleasure a few years ago to present the inaugural lecture in the Berg Auditorium on your campus. Paul was present that day, making it special.

A great challenge of the next decade is managing the cost and availability of healthcare while encouraging … Next Page »

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