But Venky’s arrival and the installation of a new administration under Summers that has made science a top priority has also brought a new focus on applied science.

Faculty and administrators alike laud Venky for his superb leadership of the DEAS expansion thus far. They say he has been instrumental in helping to attract a significant number of faculty members over the last five years. He estimates he has hired about 30 professors, between replacing retiring faculty and creating new positions.

“He was able to make, when he came here, quite a number of faculty appointments [and] the appointments still continue,” Harrington said. “This place is really very very different, frankly, than it had been in the past 25 years.”

And many support pushing the expansion even further to create a full-sized School of Applied Sciences, Engineering and Technology, an idea embraced by Hyman’s Allston science committee.

DEAS has conducted significant fundraising over the last year, raising $27.5 million, including the addition of 5 endowed professorships at $3.5 million each.

Summers said that although Harvard’s engineering efforts would expand, they would not match the scope of other top-tier facilities.

“In engineering, we’re never going to compete on quantity and field coverage,” Summers said. “We’re never going to try to have the kind of scale that MIT has—that’s not our focus.”

But he said efforts to date have helped Harvard catch up in many areas and the plans for Allston expansion would position the University to lead in many cutting-edge fields.

“On our ability to be interdisciplinary and to be extraordinary, if you look at the flagship faculty…we stand out,” he said. “And as we increase the scale, I think we’ll become much more attractive.”

Hyman wrote that in building engineering, Harvard would have the advantage of starting from scratch in many areas under “a strong and visionary DEAS dean.”

“We do not have legacy areas of engineering that we might now wish to restructure [and] we have a tradition of interdisciplinary collaboration to build on,” he wrote.

There’s only one problem: there isn’t space in Cambridge for DEAS to expand beyond its Pierce Hall base. In the life sciences, expansion to keep pace with competitors faces similar constraints.

NUCLEUS OF THE PROBLEM

While Harvard has long been an international leader in the life sciences, never has it faced such stiff competition.

Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology Chair Andrew P. McMahon said that while Harvard remains “exceptionally strong” in life sciences, the field is growing increasingly competitive. “In the life sciences particularly, there’s been one enormous change over the last 20 years, and that’s the growth of top-rate research in medical schools,” McMahon said. “20 years ago, all the top-rate research happened within a regular undergraduate university campus or within specialized research institutes.”