Exploring these questions led us to an assessment of our work and our future as a world-class scientific institution. This exercise informed strategies that will enable us to achieve our best science, now and going forward. While we are fortunate that our endowment and your generous support provide us with an enviable level of independence, forefront science increasingly requires major investment.
Understanding that the future of the scientific enterprise is interdisciplinary and collaborative, we have formed a new alliance with Caltech, which will open many opportunities for breakthrough research between our two institutions. This partnership builds on our shared history in astronomy and astrophysics and will enable us to make a decisive investment in the global fight against climate change by consolidating our life and environmental science research into a single location. To meet this grand challenge, we will be leaving our campuses in Baltimore and Palo Alto and moving our departments of Embryology, Global Ecology, and Plant Biology to Pasadena.