The 5-pager is at least partly to help the Dean identify interdisciplinary initiatives that cover multiple departments. We expect feedback on the viability of the various initiatives prior to the submission of each department's full plan. The only one I was approached with was one that described high performance computing with the computer science and maybe one other department. Bob and I disucssed this briefly but it didn't go much further. I have to say I have not been very proactive in trying to generate an inter-disciplinary initiative that started with the HEP group. It strikes me that many of the proposals the physics planning committee are very artificial and half-hearted: "We are told we must do this and this may be the only way we will get something out of this plan..."; as opposed to being based on solid scientific and academic grounds.
At the planning meeting this week (see the agenda/notes ) we discussed possible criteria we would use to rank the different proposals as a prelude to preparing our 5-page mini-plan. We also identified the replacement of at least two (and perhaps four) of the UG lecturers as possibly being higher on our agenda than any research faculty positions (even ones that are inter-disciplinary). We also concluded that we should begin to assemble the arguments for positions along the more traditional lines of the department among the research sub-groups.
Though we will probably not get into this in the report due in the Faculty office by the end of the month we may use any common themes from among these sub-discipline documents to temper our enthusiasm for inter-disciplinarity (this is the direction I sense the planning committee is headed) in our 5-page report.
I include links to the inter-disciplinary proposals that the Physics department finds itself involved in, in some way. At least I have links for all the ones I have electronic versions of. There may be one or two more that are only on paper.
Mathematical Physics Institute
We met on January 15 and discussed the one page documents from each of the sub-groups in the department: