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From the chancellor: Fostering innovation

In a March 2015 article about higher education innovation, Fast Company magazine featured our Rees-Jones Hall, describing it as “an incubator facility designed to maximize social and intellectual connectivity.”

From the chancellor: Fostering innovation

In a March 2015 article about higher education innovation, Fast Company magazine featured our Rees-Jones Hall, describing it as “an incubator facility designed to maximize social and intellectual connectivity.”

Texas Christian University is a living laboratory for active learning and innovative ideas.

Two of the University’s newest buildings — Rees-Jones Hall and the Annie Richardson Bass addition — are facilitating connectivity and innovation that will ultimately lead to positive change, as will the “reimagined” Mary Couts Burnett Library when renovation is complete. These buildings factor into the overall master facility plan that sets forth the University’s Intellectual Commons, designed as an academic crossroads of campus that also includes the expansion of the Neeley School of Business.

Both Rees-Jones Hall and the Bass Building are outfitted with some of the best teaching and learning technology available. Classrooms provide flexibility, necessary for students to be more active participants in the learning process. The facilities also are designed to foster collaboration across disciplines. This issue of TCU Magazine will introduce you to some of the people and programs that are experiencing transformation as a result.

It is clear that we are not simply educating our students for their first steps up the career ladder. We are preparing them for an increasingly complex, uncertain and competitive future. Research reinforces that those who are educated will help drive future solutions. Consequently, we are reimagining the TCU experience to better educate extraordinary learners, critical thinkers and ethical leaders who see the world in terms of opportunity, who can invent and innovate what is needed most.

Multidisciplinary learning is key to developing revolutionary solutions to complex problems. TCU’s new facilities in the Intellectual Commons epitomize the multidisciplinary approach. In a March 2015 article about higher education innovation, Fast Company magazine featured our Rees-Jones Hall, describing it as “an incubator facility designed to maximize social and intellectual connectivity.” The building provides an environment, the article notes, “where students can develop ideas, advance prototypes, conduct market analysis and test products.” Rees-Jones Hall is organized to “facilitate creative, intellectual ‘collisions’ to encourage student-faculty collaboration across multiple fields.”

The Bass Building has the high-tech learning environments also found in Rees-Jones Hall, which go far beyond simply incorporating new digital devices. Instead, technology strategically transforms these spaces. The addition features include patient simulators and advanced hospital-quality health care equipment. In the renovated original building, Harris College of Nursing & Health Sciences students further benefit from a mini-hospital and an ambulatory care clinic. The building provides an academic resource center and greatly enhanced spaces for the Department of Social Work and College of Science & Engineering’s Department of Nutritional Sciences. These innovations enable TCU students to sharpen both their practical and academic skills and effectively prepare for leadership in their chosen fields.

TCU remains committed to maintaining our connection culture — where faculty, staff, and students can pursue their intellectual curiosities and rise to their fullest potential. By leveraging our connectivity amid these next-generation facilities, TCU fosters innovation, and, as a result, becomes more interdisciplinary and entrepreneurial. This allows us to better equip our graduates to shape the future.

Our focus continues on the Academy of Tomorrow — people and programs and the facilities in which they “live.”

Victor J. Boschini, Jr.
v.boschini@tcu.edu

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