Farach-Carson named BRC scientific director
Work progressing rapidly on shared, second-floor BRC facilities

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News staff

Mary “Cindy” Farach-Carson, Rice’s first associate vice provost for research, has added another first to her career achievements at Rice: first scientific director of the university’s BioScience Research Collaborative (BRC).

	MARY “CINDY” FARACH-CARSON

Rice Provost George McLendon announced Farach-Carson’s new role at a Jan. 20 town hall meeting to discuss the BRC’s future. McLendon told about 100 people at the meeting that Rice is in negotiations with a number of industry and academic partners to occupy much of the building, and Farach-Carson told the audience the university is working to complete shared facilities on the BRC’s second floor.

“Next month we’ll be moving a mass spectrometer from the main campus along with a transmission electron microscope,” she said. “That will serve as a core to support research on proteomics and small-molecule metabolomics.”

The new equipment will be operated by Rice’s Shared Equipment Authority, which is developing new guidelines that will allow researchers from non-Rice labs in the building to share time on the equipment, Farach-Carson said.

She said shared facilities for microfluidics research and tissue engineering are also planned for the second floor, and the university is negotiating to create a protein-production facility there.

In addition to the scientific support structure, McLendon and Farach-Carson said a coffee vendor is slated to open soon, and Sara Lowman, vice provost and university librarian, said work is progressing toward completion of library facilities on the second floor.

Farach-Carson encouraged members of the Rice community who have ideas about how the shared infrastructure can foster collaboration in the BRC to contact her at mcf1@rice.edu.

A professor of biochemistry and cell biology, Farach-Carson joined the Rice faculty in 2009. The Galveston native came to Rice from the University of Delaware, where she was the founding director of the Center for Translational Cancer Research. Her research focuses on how extracellular matrix molecules function in healthy bone and contribute to bone diseases such as osteoporosis or cancer metastasis to bone. Farach-Carson was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science this month for her contributions to the field of bone physiology and for her efforts to promote interdisciplinary research.