New biochemistry department will offer graduate courses

This year, IU opened its first new science department in more than 30 years.

The Department of Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry is located in Simon Hall, which was designed with the department’s needs in mind.

The department has been in the works for seven years and was preceded by a graduate interdisciplinary program. It offers graduate courses as well as M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in biochemistry.

“One of the things we lacked on this campus initially was a lot of infrastructure needed to do biochemistry,” said Carl Bauer, the first chairman of the department. “Many of this equipment cost millions and millions of dollars, so it’s really a big commitment by the University.”

Suzanne Schwartz, the departmental manager and fiscal officer, said the department’s faculty comes from the interdisciplinary program.

The new department will now administer the interdisciplinary graduate program, Bauer said.

There are many divisions in biology and chemistry, making it hard to find enough biochemists to compete with other large universities.

Because the biochemists were scattered throughout medical sciences, chemistry and biology and there was no central location or facility for them, it was hard to attract an
adequate mass of biochemists on campus, Bauer said.

The department consists of 74 students and two staff members.

Simon Hall, which is 140,000 square feet, cost $55.7 million to build, Schwartz said.
Nine million dollars of funding for the building came from the Simon family of the Simon
Malls and Simon Property Group, Inc. Herb Simon is co-owner of the Pacers.

IU was also given a $20 million state bond for the department’s creation.
After the building was completed, Bauer said faculty was needed to fill all of the laboratories.

“We decided that we had to focus our initial hires in a targeted area,” Bauer said.

The best plan to have a “big impact really quickly” was to hire two or three people who were very skilled in their area, he said.

Bauer found that Bogdan Dragnea and Tuli Mukhopadhyay worked in virus assembly and had collaborators in the area, who were soon hired.

“Biochemistry was one of the missing pieces of the puzzle for what we needed for life sciences on this campus,” Bauer said, adding that “it was sorely needed for a long time ... It’s great that we’re finally catching up.”