New VP for Research brings new ideas to USU
Although he has only been on campus for seven weeks, Mark McLellan has already spent hours working to merge the School of Graduate Studies with the vice president of Research position.
“It is a fully-integrated office, which means we will hybridize and maximize the efficiency of the two offices, while maintaining the identity of all the different units that pour in,” McLellan said.
USU is a land-grant institution. The land-grant model focuses on teaching, extension and research, and McLellan said those are at the core of his beliefs as well.
One thing McLellan said drew him to USU was President Stan Albrecht’s vision for the university.
“Utah State has a rich history and the president is a pretty progressive leader. President Albrecht sees the university as growing, as full of a lot of energy,” he said. “From its history of more of a teaching-based program, to a future of very strong, aggressive research and teaching and outreach.”
Essentially, combining the two offices is going to add focus to both departments. Putting the two together puts research around the graduate school. McLellan said research is a core element of graduate-level work and doing this will help enhance and preserve both elements.
Before coming to Logan, McLellan worked at the University of Florida where he was the dean for research and the director of the Florida Agricultural Experiment Station – Institute of Food and Agriculture Sciences. Over the last 30 years, he has been at three different universities where he was heavily involved in research. Eventually, Albrecht caught the attention of McLellan and the two started talking about a transition to USU.
“Coming here to Utah State is exciting,” he said. “It’s an opportunity to take these things that I’ve learned and stretch it across the whole university. I’m trying to take the best I learned from all the other institutions and bring it forward.”
Utah State is much smaller than the University of Florida, but, McLellan said, that excites him.
“There are advantages to be being a little bit of a smaller university,” he said. “We can be more nimble. We can be quicker to act and engage. We can act with a lot of precision, very quickly. Those things should make us particularly effective and that’s exciting.”
One of McLellan’s biggest goals in coming to USU, he said, is to really focus on faculty members on an individual level.
“How do I help them be more successful?” he asked. “How do I clear the administrative path so they are more successful in getting done what they dream about?”
The answers to those questions start with quality hiring, he said.
“We really need to make a special attempt to get the best person in the job,” he said. “We need to reach out and look for the best person who will fit inside our culture and our growing university, and be a real contributor from the program.”
McLellan also plans to help faculty members become better at writing grant proposals and seeking out individuals or organizations that will aid the university in research funding and opportunities.
Along with training faculty, training for graduate students is also important and needs to be improved, he said.
“We want to make their experience very successful. We need to build skills development beyond what we produce in a lab or on the stage.”
A vital part of getting the research of USU faculty members and students out into the world is reconnecting the right side of the brain with the left side, he said.
“It’s taking the creativity of an artist and matching that with the fundamentals of a science explorer and creating a hybrid exploration to find something really unusual and really translational to our needs,” he said. “We’ve solved many of the simple problems, but the big problems ahead of us are really challenging and often are interrelated with man and society.”
–megan.allen@aggiemail.usu.edu