David Martin, a professor and head of the psychology department, is retiring from his position after 14 years at the University.

Last spring, a nomination committee was formed to start looking for a replacement head for the psychology department, a long task that came to completion the beginning of this semester.

The dean of the College of Humanities & Social Sciences asked for volunteers to form a nomination committee, whom along with appointed members, would lead the task of finding a new head for the department.

“The nominating committee gathered and began their search by deciding what would go into the job description, and then published it in magazines and papers distributed amongst the psychology community,” David Martin, head of the psychology department, said.

The response to the job was great and the committee received many applications for the job throughout the summer, which then the nomination committee sorted through.

The committee was searching for not only someone who had experience in teaching psychology, but also had experience in administrative tasks.

“The process began last spring and culminated in the final four candidates all coming to visit the campus at the end of the fall semester,” Rupert Nacoste, a professor of psychology and a member of the nomination committee, said. “While here, each one of the candidates gave two speeches to the faculty; one on their research and the other on their administrative philosophy.”

After the visits, the nomination committee went around and gathered the opinions of the faculty regarding each of the candidates before narrowing their choice down to two.

“We gave the names of the two candidates[who] we thought were best suited to the dean to negotiate and make a final decision on who the new head of the department would be,” Nacoste said.

Finally, it was announced that Doug Gillian, the head of the department of psychology for New Mexico State University, would be the one to replace Martin in June.

“I think Gillian will make a great department head,” Martin said. “There are both good and bad things about bringing someone in from outside of the UNC system.”

Getting to know the campus and learning who to go to when something needs to be done is just one of the negatives Martin listed, which was highly outweighed by the good.

“I think that this is good for the University. I think that hiring outside of our current professors brings in new and fresh ideas,” Samantha Newton, a senior in psychology, said.