Houston joins College of Sciences as new Dean

After over thirty years at Cornell University, Paul Houston is coming to Tech to become the new Dean of the College of Sciences. He will begin the role July 1, taking over from interim dean Kent Barefield, a professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

The position became vacant last August when Gary Schuster, who had held it since 1994, replaced Jean-Lou Chameau as provost. Chameau left to become president of California Institute of Technology.

"I think that he has a great vision for the College of Sciences, both to strengthen the disciplinary excellence in the college and to build interdisciplinary programs between the sciences, engineering, computing and the other colleges at Georgia Tech," Schuster said.

Houston earned his bachelor's degree in chemistry from Yale University and his doctorate in chemistry from MIT in 1973. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, he joined the Cornell faculty in 1975.

From 1997 until 2001 he was chair of Cornell's Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and from 2002 until 2005, he was Senior Associate Dean of Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences.

"I met with him a few times and my impression is that he is an excellent scientist from a very good chemistry department with all the favorable attributes of strong scholarship, administrative experience and, I gather, good leadership as well," Barefield said.

As provost, Schuster was charged with appointing the search committee to appoint his replacement for his former position, a task for which he said he relied on the advice of senior faculty members at Tech.

According to the website of the College of Sciences, Baker Parker and Associates was the search firm contracted to assist with the process.

Anselm Griffin, chair of the School of Polymer, Textile, and Fiber Engineering, chaired the 18 person committee along with co-chair Al Merrill, a professor in the School of Biology. The committee included eight professors from both within and outside of the College of Sciences and the remainder consisted of members of the Tech community in various other capacities.

"I think we had a very good committee from across the spectrum of the College of Sciences and people from other parts of the institution. We met on a regular basis with the help of the search firm that was involved in the process, who handled a lot of the logistics of the process and also helped arrange some of the interviews for candidates," Griffin said.

"[Houston] made a very good impression on lots of people here at Georgia Tech. He is a first-rate researcher with administrative experience at Cornell. Many of his former duties as Senior Associate Dean are similar in principle to the things he'll be involved with here. I think he has a great vision for what he wanted the college to become and his experience, we felt, made him an excellent candidate to carry out that vision," Griffin said.

"Our search committee spent some time discussing what we'd like to see in the ideal dean candidate and then we had discussions about the applications that came in once they were made available to us," Griffin said.

Schuster said "many dozens" of candidates applied for the position, and after reviewing all of them, the committee narrowed the list to about fifteen.

The committee held discussions with these candidates and then further narrowed the list of candidates down to three, according to Griffin. They invited the three finalists to campus for a three-day interview process.

In addition to talking to the candidates, Griffin said that the committee met with other groups from the College of Sciences and across the Institute.

The search committee completed its interviews with each of the three candidates in early March, according to Griffin, and was not directly involved in the final decision of which of the three candidates should be chosen to be the new dean.

"The hours of commentary about the candidates went to the provost, just our comments with no ranking, and then the provost took over the search," Griffin said.

Schuster and Barefield, having served as dean before Houston, identified a number of important issues that will be waiting when he assumes the new position in July.

"The College of Sciences and Georgia Tech have been growing at such a rapid rate that [the college] has outgrown the space available for teaching and research. One of the major challenges he's going to face is finding the sufficient resources to acquire the space that will enable us to support our faculty and students," Schuster said.

Barefield emphasized the particular importance of a new strategic plan for the college as the Institute embarks on its $1 billion capital campaign.

"The college needs to update its strategic plan or develop a new one. The strategic plan we have is five or six years old and it's the time in the natural cycle that we should be redoing it. I didn't want to undertake that process because I really think that's something the new permanent dean should do," Barefield said.

"This year three of our schools have undergone an Academic Program Review by the Board of Regents and those units have already done extensive work on their strategic plans. The other schools should come along and do similar things and then [Houston] can put those together and create a strategic plan for the college," Barefield said.

"We're already into the silent page of the capital campaign, but as you go into the public phase you definitely want to have a strategic plan that you can talk about, with things that you can get people excited about supporting with their money," Barefield said.