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April 15, 2005 > News > Keller-McNulty to succeed Burrus as engineering dean

Keller-McNulty to succeed Burrus as engineering dean

By Amber Obermeyer | Thresher Editorial Staff

Sallie Keller-McNulty will become Rice’s eighth engineering dean in July, Provost Eugene Levy announced April 4. Keller-McNulty is currently the group leader for the Statistical Sciences Group at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Keller-McNulty will replace Sidney Burrus, who has served as dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering since 1998. Burrus will retire from his positions as dean and professor but will continue to teach and work with Rice’s Connexions project, a collection of free scholarly materials and educational software.

Levy, President David Leebron, and other deans and vice presidents interviewed four finalists for the position early this semester. None of the four finalists was from Rice, Levy said.

“[Keller-McNulty] was clearly energetic, and she has serious accomplishments and leadership, particularly in the Los Alamos National Laboratory,” Levy said. “She comes with a set of ambitions to move the school forward that are admirable. She’s well-known nationally, and she understands the environment in which a school of engineering operates.”

Keller-McNulty said Rice’s emphasis on collaborative research appealed to her.

“Rice has always been attractive because of its preeminence and its reputation for undergraduate education,” she said. “What really intrigued me was the way Rice approaches interdisciplinary science. … A lot of places talk about interdisciplinary research, and a lot of places can create interdisciplinary centers, but Rice is making it real, and that was very exciting.”

The choice

With Keller-McNulty’s arrival, Rice will become the only major research university with female deans of both natural sciences and engineering.

Dean of Natural Sciences Kathleen Matthews, who became a dean in 1998, chaired the search committee for the engineering dean.

Matthews, a biochemestry and cell biology professor, said Keller-McNulty’s experience with national organizations will help Rice secure more research funding.

“What stands out about her is the diversity of her career,” Matthews said. “She has had experience not just in the academy, but also at the National Science Foundation and in a national lab. She has this web of connections across the country, and her service on national academies’ committees indicates how well she is is thought of in those communities.”

Martel College senior Chris Gibson, the undergraduate representative on the search committee, said he expects the engineering school to gain more national recognition because of Keller-McNulty’s connections.

Gibson said he thinks undergraduates will feel Keller-McNulty’s influence indirectly.

“A dean might spend three days a week out raising money or going to Washington to talk to people,” Gibson said. “You’re not going to see her on campus all the time, but when all is said and done and the school has more money, you’ll see the trickle-down effect.”

The candidate

Keller-McNulty followed an unconventional path to her doctorate in statistics, attending a community college in Florida before transferring to the University of South Florida, where she intended to study art but switched her major to mathematics her junior year. Keller-McNulty took her first statistics course as she was starting her master’s thesis in mathematics at South Florida. She then studied statistics at Iowa State University, where she earned her doctorate in 1983.

Keller-McNulty taught at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro and Kansas State University and worked at the National Science Foundation before starting at Los Alamos in 1998.

Keller-McNulty will serve as president of the American Statistical Association next year. She received the Founders Award, which recognizes lifetime achievement, from the ASA in 2002.

Founders Award recipients are usually older than Keller-McNulty, Statistics Department Chair Kathy Ensor said.

“[The statistics department] would have hired her under any circumstances if given the opportunity,” Ensor said. “We’re very pleased she’s coming in as dean and even more pleased that she’s coming in as a full professor in the department as well.”

Keller-McNulty said she will participate in research with statistics faculty members but is unsure when and how much she will teach at Rice.

“I already have research connections to several faculty in the department,” Keller-McNulty said. “I’m sure I’ll teach at some point, but it won’t be right away. I’m very interested in what’s going to be the right connection not just to the graduate students but to the undergraduates. When I went through school, I could spell dean, but I had no concept of what a dean did until I was interviewing for jobs after I got my Ph.D.”

Keller-McNulty’s areas of research are uncertainty quantification, computational and graphical statistics, and data access and confidentiality.

The search

While none of the finalists for the position were from Rice, Levy said he had no preference for an internal or external candidate. Matthews said each candidate was evaluated equally.

“We didn’t push anyone out because they were inside, and we didn’t pull anyone in because they were inside,” Matthews said. “We looked at everyone who came before us.”

The committee began gathering names of potential candidates during the summer, Matthews said.

After identifying about 200 potential candidates early in the fall, the committee narrowed the list to about 80 names by mid-November.

Gibson said the committee then identified about 15 candidates and interviewed them in December before passing the list of finalists to Leebron and Levy in early January.

There were initially five finalists, but one dropped out early to pursue another position, Levy said.

Keller-McNulty said she was not looking for a new job and did not seriously consider pursuing the position until Matthews called her in November.

“When [Matthews] called and asked if I was willing to come out for a three-hour interview, my reaction was that I would have advised any colleague to do it to gain experience,” Keller-McNulty said. “After the interview, I thought it was a good experience — it was interesting, I enjoyed meeting all the people — but I wasn’t thinking about being called back. The thought of leaving my job at Los Alamos was not on my radar.”

Keller-McNulty said she became increasingly interested in the position throughout the selection process.

“When I got called at the first of the year, I did a lot more research,” Keller-McNulty said. “I started to do some serious looking and thinking, trying to determine if I could do it and trying to decide if I thought that I had something to really contribute. I decided maybe I did and agreed to come to campus again.”

The committee included Ensor, Gibson, Matthews, Environmental Engineering Professor Pedro Alvarez, Computational and Applied Mathematics Professor Liliana Borcea, bioengineering graduate student Jenni Greeson, Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Naomi Halas, Vice President for Resource Development Eric Johnson, University Professor Ken Kennedy, Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Ed Knightly, Senior Department Administrator in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science Kay McStay, Bioengineering Professor Tony Mikos, Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science Professor Marcia O’Malley, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Professor Matteo Pasquali, Board of Trustees member Bernard Pieper (B.A. ‘53) and Chemistry Professor James Tour.

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