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Hi. I’m Ranny Reicker, president of the Herbert and Grace A. Dow Foundation.
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I really think undergraduate research is particularly important to us because we look at the history
of Herbert Dow, and he was inventing things when he was a teenager and even younger. And,
probably that can be a really particularly creative period in people’s lives, when
they are young and they don’t stop and think ‘you can’t think that way.’ They really
think ‘you can think out of the box.’ Nothing’s impossible. You think why not
do it? One of the other things I think is important
about undergraduate research is it gives an opportunity to get out of the silos of just
one discipline working all by itself. Particularly as we look at the way science is practiced
in the 21st century, it is so multidisciplinary and so cross siloed. Even in the fields of
science or technology, that the earlier students can learn to do that, the better off they
are, in my estimation. We certainly have not totally underwritten
the Institute. But we have created a substantial portion of seed money that’s going to make
it possible for the institute to go ahead and to grow, to attract other support, to
become even more multidisciplinary; because certainly the whole idea of creative research
is not limited to the sciences and technology. Everything is valuable: history, or social
science, or the arts, as it is science and technology. In fact, there’s so many ways
that they all work back and forth and interact more and more. That, I think, is the exciting
potential of the Institute. Probably the things that have caught my eye
more than anything else are the ones that are truly cross-disciplinary. Nursing students
working with engineering students to solve problems. With this foundation, and we’ve
always tended when we’re doing things to particularly look at science and technology
education and how important it is. Most of us who have had some kind of science background,
at some point in time in our lives, and it’s just part of our DNA, that it is science and
technology, and it is creativity and it is exploration and research, and they are very
important parts of our lives.