Lamont Weekly Report, August 28, 2009

I spent a few idyllic days up north in the Adirondacks at the beginning of the week - discovering the profound limitations of
Verizon's published coverage charts and the remarkably tiny spatial scales upon which cell phone signal strengths vary dramatically - tens of meters in places!

But more importantly - our final proposal to the federal agency's stimulus-funded infrastructure programs was submitted just before the deadline on Monday.  Of the three we have submitted over the last couple of months this was the largest - asking for an $8M renovation of the second floor of the New Core Lab.  In total we now have over $15M of requests for building and renovation work around the campus into three different agencies - NIH, NIST and NSF.  I am not so naive as to think we will get all three funded, but even one or two of them will allow us to continue the important process of campus renewal that we have begun with the opening of the Comer Building.  Bonnie Bonkowski and Pat O'Reilly have been the heroes who have born the brunt of the work in preparing what was in total many hundreds of pages of proposal text and architectural diagrams.

But overall it has been admittedly a quiet week - and as the rain pours down, I nevertheless look forward to the weekend,
Have a good one,

- Mike