Chris McGahan assumed her new role as dean of the College of Sciences on Nov. 6. Following former dean William Ditto, McGahan previously served as a professor of pharmacology at NC State since 1983 and led the Department of Molecular Biomedical Sciences in the College of Veterinary Medicine as department head for 14 years. McGahan was also named one of NC State’s Transformational Women in 2013 by the Council on the Status of Women, and was a part of the 2016 inaugural class of the NC State Research Leadership Academy. Technician sat down with the new dean to discuss her transition to the new position and what goals she has planned for next semester and the upcoming years.

How did you make the decision to switch jobs?

I was offered the job by the provost, and I saw a lot of opportunities. Being a department head for 14 years, I decided that this would be a great new challenge. It would be something I hadn’t done and hadn’t actually thought about doing. I wasn’t sure the dean job was exactly right for my personality, but I really thought it was worth a try because of all the opportunities to grow programs here and to work on really strong programs. I’ve always been very involved with people in the biological sciences which is part of this college, so I had some familiarity with the college. I really like working with those people, mainly in the toxicology program, but also in genetics, and so those two programs I was quite familiar with. I thought, ‘Wow this could be fun.’ And so I decided to take the responsibility on.

How do you think your previous work as both the department head and the professor will help prepare you for this position?

First as professor I really understand the research world because I had an NIH [National Institute of Health] grant for over 30 years. So I really know that world well. I served on study sections. I was on an NIH council, and I was able to develop grant writing programs to help my faculty. I was able to grow my faculty from the lowest recession of 25 to 43, so I know all about hiring faculty. I’ve been through the research of the reappointment, promotion and tenure process for those 14 years. So being a faculty member, I was prepared to be department head because I knew a lot about everything.

But becoming department head, you’re then in charge of the hiring. You’re actually doing the hiring and negotiation of startup packages, and then the faculty do the voting on reappointment, promotion, and tenure, and then the department head decides whether they agree with the faculty or not. It’s a long process. It takes about a year. So as a professor I was familiar with everything at the ground level, and then as department head I was familiar with the higher level parts of administration. I think it would be hard to be dean without having been a department head. It happens and people do really good jobs because they learn and they’ve been faculty members, so they know the processes.

But I think that there are a lot of hard decisions that you have to make about money and about people and everything at a department head level, that when you take on a dean position, it’s just a really different job. I’m trying not to be a department head, and it’s hard to make that transition, not micromanaging the departments, so I’m still on that learning curve. But I think that prepared me for the dean job.

What are you most excited about as the dean?

The most exciting to me is the program building. I’m really into building interdisciplinary programs. When I was a department head over at the veterinarian college, I was very excited when the Chancellor’s Faculty Excellence Program was developed. It was from the ground-up that the Chancellor threw out a challenge and said provide me with proposals around a theme. There would be three to five faculty members, and you didn’t want them to be in the same department. He wanted them to be a cluster of related people solving a big problem. So there might be somebody from biological sciences, somebody from the vet school, somebody from engineering so that they would build a cluster of people and the cluster itself could be this group of new faculty, but they should build on some programs that could be put together. I hired one person from each of five different clusters and it greatly enriched my program.

So I really like this interdisciplinary concept because that’s where science is going. I’m really excited about being a part of it because we have a lot of CFEPS [Chancellor’s Faculty Excellence Program] here at the College of Sciences. That program is a great program, and it’s been going on for six years. The ones that are complete, some of them have been really outstanding, and so I’ve been excited to be part of that as a department head.

I really want to work out a strategic plan for the college. I think the university’s starting a new strategic plan of development, so I want to be in line with what they develop. I want the departments, and there are six departments in the college, to be developing their own idea of where they think they want the departments to go in teaching and in research. I don’t want to do a cookie-cutter where a professor in this area retires or goes to another job, and then we replace that person with a person that does exactly the same thing. I think we need to step back and look at where the fields are going and decide what we’re going to concentrate on.

What is your vision for a successful College of Sciences in the next couple of years?

The departments are a bit siloed. And what I mean by that is that they’re really separated from each other now. I’d really like to have less silos and to have departments be more interactive with each other. Most things that are built at a university are really built by the faculty. So I view myself as an enabler of other people’s visions about how they think they can build programs. So I’m not a top down person. I still view myself as a faculty member, but I really do think it comes up from the faculty. So my vision is to really watch, really see exciting new opportunities and support them.

What are your short term goals for the upcoming semester?

My short term goals are to learn the college and department cultures. I’m meeting with each department head separately. I want to learn how our college interacts with other colleges. I also need to learn the cultures of the departments, and each department has a different way of doing things. So I’ve already met with physics and I’ve met with statistics departments faculty and staff. I had a big staff meeting with the staff of the whole college and had a good turnout; over a hundred people, maybe more, and I thought that was a good meeting. In January I’ll finish all of the preliminary meetings, and then I would like to continue maybe to meet with the departments once a year or once a semester. I just want to meet with them when they want to meet. And maybe we’ll just have a whole college meeting and go over where the status of the college is. I would like to do that by the end of next semester when I have it figured out. Hopefully in my meetings with the faculty I’ll encourage them to talk to me about big ideas that they have about programmatic needs and programmatic interests.

What’s your favorite part about the NC State community?

I’ve been here for 35 years, and I really love the people. It was really hard for me to leave my department because we had a great culture and a culture of people helping each other, working together well. That was the hardest thing when the provost asked me to take this job. I told him, ‘I can’t leave my faculty and my staff.’ And he said, ‘Well you’ll have to leave them sometime.’ That was hard. I think it is the community at the university. People are great. I love being at a university of course; it’s the only adult job I’ve had. I love science. I love being in academia. I love to be with professors, all professors not just scientists. I find it very interesting to work with people that are in the social sciences and other areas.