Patrick T. Harker President

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Louis Pasteur would well understand the electric anticipation accompanying the opening of UD’s Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Lab this fall. ISE Lab is, indeed, our temple of the future, where the University’s pioneering research will find a home built on the foundation of openness and collaboration; where new discoveries will redraw the boundaries of human knowledge, and new innovations will help us harness it; where young talent will be developed and deployed to solve the problems that challenge us locally and globally; where students will see every day the enormous power of putting science to work.

Certainly, UD’s research isn’t confined to a building. Look through these pages and you’ll see that the world is our laboratory, bringing our people into schools and neighborhoods and families, taking us into the eye of a Mid-Atlantic hurricane and across the desolate mountain ranges of Central Asia.

But still we build laboratories, and thank goodness we do. Laboratories are our incubators for inquiry and invention. They’re an endorsement of our best ideas. They’re an investment in the extraordinary people who’ve signed onto our mission of transforming the world and shrinking human limitations. Laboratories are many students’ first experience with education in action. It’s where they coax meaning from curricula, and first fall in love with learning.

“Live in the serene peace of laboratories and libraries,” Pasteur said. While I have heavy doubts about how serene ISE Lab will be come fall, I have no doubt whatsoever that the buildings we build today—these temples to discovery and knowledge and progress—will help create the future we all long for, the future that’s within our grasp.

Sincerely,

Patrick T. Harker

President, University of Delaware