Searching for a new president

As you know, Paul Nurse will be leaving Rockefeller at the end of the year to take up the presidency of the Royal Society in London.

The vice chairs of the Board of Trustees and I, together with the Executive Committee of the Board, have now decided on the process we will follow to identify a new president to succeed Paul. We have agreed that it is important that we consult widely and, in particular, that we take advantage of the knowledge and extensive experience of members of the faculty. We have established a search committee comprising thirteen members with myself as chair, eight other members of the Board of Trustees (including three of the scientific members, Joe Goldstein, David Botstein and David Hirsh) and four members of the Rockefeller faculty. Two faculty members have been nominated by the faculty through Academic Council to join the search committee, Cori Bargmann and Michel Nussenzweig, and two faculty members have been invited by the vice chairs and myself to join, Rod MacKinnon and Mike Young. The other trustees on the committee are Marlene Hess, Marnie Pillsbury, Don Randel, Rick Salomon and Jim Simons. Jane Rendall will serve as secretary to the committee.

An executive search firm, Spencer Stuart, has been engaged to assist the committee in the process. Jennifer Bol, the lead partner of the Spencer Stuart team, worked on the previous search which brought Paul Nurse to Rockefeller. Jennifer and her colleagues, Alexis Stiles and Heather Carpenito, will help us identify qualified candidates, provide background research on those candidates, and manage the logistics of the search process.

I want to ensure that all members of the university community have a voice in the process of finding a new leader for our institution. In that regard we have set up an e-mail address, search@rockefeller.edu, to receive the inputs of members of the Rockefeller community. I encourage all members of the community to e-mail us their thoughts on both the characteristics we should be looking for in a new president and any suggestions as to potential candidates that we should consider. If you recommend a candidate to us, please include the individual’s name, institutional affiliation and a brief description of why you feel the individual merits consideration for the position. While it will be necessary throughout the process to preserve confidentiality with respect to the names of individuals the committee identifies as potential candidates, we intend to communicate regularly with the campus on our progress in the process, and we wish this process to be as transparent as possible.

We plan to have the first formal meeting of the search committee on May 19.  With your help we hope to have a large pool of suggested candidates to consider at that meeting. Before the end of June we expect to develop a short list of no more than ten individuals to be contacted and invited for interviews.

If all goes well, I anticipate that we will have our next president in place by the end of this year, before Paul departs for London. As I said in my e-mail to the campus when Paul and I informed you of his planned departure, the university is in excellent shape and is in a strong position to attract an outstanding individual as the next president of Rockefeller.