Carson appointed Dean of Natural Sciences

By Sarah Rutledge     8/28/08 7:00pm

Beginning next year, the Wiess School of Natural Sciences will get a facelift. Dan Carson, professor and chair of the department of biological sciences at the University of Delaware, will take over from Kathleen Matthews when she steps down in January. Carson was offered the position in June. Provost Eugene Levy had organized a committee to search for the new dean last semester.

This will not be Carson's first time working in Houston. Before his 10-year stint at Delaware, he worked at University of Texas' M.D. Anderson Cancer Center for 15 years. Carson said these two jobs will help him when he comes to Rice, a smaller school with an emphasis on research within the medical community.

"Those two experiences combined have framed my approach to thinking about a place like Rice," he said.

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Carson said the change from Delaware, a mid-sized university, to Rice, a small university, means far fewer students than he is used to in the sciences and a smaller student-faculty ratio. At Delaware, he could expect 1,000 undergraduates and 40 faculty members, while he will have to get used to the roughly 700 undergraduates majoring in sciences and the 120 faculty members.

But Carson said he likes the size of Rice's student population.

"To have the student-faculty ratio be so low here at Rice really insures there's going to be much more personal contact with faculty and students, more opportunities to interact, a better quality of education and more opportunities for students to participate in research and projects," he said.

Carson will visit the campus this semester to learn the ropes from Matthews before moving to Houston next spring. His biology research laboratory at Delaware will move to Houston next summer.

Carson said his vision for the sciences program depends on what he hears from its faculty members.

"What I plan to do first and foremost is to spend my time early on meeting with all the staff and faculty in the Wiess School and hear their ideas about what their vision is for Rice, and understand what they view as working really well, and what needs to be improved and formulate that into a unified and well-articulated vision on how to move forward with the college," he said. "It would be crazy to move ahead without knowing the facets of the school."

Carson said he will likely look into streamlining administrative processes in the department of natural sciences to make them more efficient. He said he will also encourage Rice's interaction with the Texas Medical Center in the Collaborative Research Center's projects.

Carson said he is excited to accept this appointment but admits it is hard to leave his position at Delaware.

"It's like having a garden that you had on a plot of land, and there was not much happening, and you spent ten years watering it and watching it grow, and now it's beautiful, but it's also inevitable that you'll have to hand it off to someone else," Carson said.

He said working at Rice will not exactly be a new start since he has kept up with friends and contacts from his days at M.D. Anderson. He said he plans to keep up with his grandchildren in Philadelphia by visiting his condominium there often.

"The leadership at Rice is absolutely fantastic, and I'm hard pressed to find anything at Rice or any individual at Rice that is anything less than excellent, so it's really going to be fun to work in that environment, exciting and challenging, and I'll do my best to rise to the challenge," Carson said.

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