You became President of Rutgers last July. Congrats! What led you to this role, and what is your vision for the university?
Prior to Rutgers, I served as president of LSU in Baton Rouge, and before that as provost at the University of South Carolina. More relevant to this conversation, I spent 18 years at Washington University in St. Louis, where, as graduate dean and vice provost, I was responsible for supporting the human capital project of a biomedical corridor, one of the emerging efforts in the country, and helped build out an innovation hub called Cortex. That experience gave me a strong foundation in thinking about how to create innovation corridors and connect universities to scientific and economic development.
I bring that experience into this role at Rutgers, where the ecosystem is already mature in many respects, but also highly competitive on the East Coast. My vision is to build on Rutgers’ strengths as a major public research university and an opportunity hub, and to ensure we develop talent, integrate research with clinical care, and create the conditions for innovation to flourish here in New Jersey.
What makes Rutgers genuinely different in life sciences, both with respect to educating students and engaging with industry?
First, you must look back and review history. Rutgers is a land-grant university, and to me that matters enormously because it reflects a core belief that talent is uniformly distributed across populations, but opportunity is not. What makes Rutgers special is that it is fundamentally about opportunity. We work across the full arc of human development, from early childhood and community engagement to scientific training and invention. We are involved in programs related to early birth, childhood development, and exposing children to science through initiatives such as 4-H and Rutgers Future Scholars. We reach into communities to find talent, and even when students do not become scientists, we aim to help them achieve social mobility.
That is why I describe Rutgers in probabilistic terms. We handle the bulk of the funnel. We bring more people into the system, expose them to science, train those who pursue it, and then help those with novel ideas protect inventions and potentially launch spinouts. At the same time, we have an unusually broad biological footprint as a land-grant and sea-grant institution, spanning land, marine biology, and even space biology. We combine a developmental perspective, engaging people at every stage, with an integration perspective through our partnership with RWJBarnabas Health and our academic medical model. That combination allows us to scale, train more physician-scientists, protect inventions, and move ideas into the marketplace in a distinctive, non-elitist way. It is about democratizing opportunity.
What is the main thing industry and institutional partners most often ask of Rutgers?
The most common ask is talent. If you take our formal relationship with a hospital system, for example, what they want on the research side is outstanding clinical departments, and the way to get there is through great physician-scientists who are also clinicians. That means we are in the talent procurement business, whether we develop that talent ourselves or recruit it. They cannot get where they want to go without a tightly coupled relationship with an academic institution.
Talent only goes where talent is. You cannot claim to be an academic medical center without the research base to back it up. Rutgers has nearly a billion dollars’ worth of research, and that gives both our partners and us a compelling story when recruiting. We are constantly working to bring in PhD-MDs and other top people because density of quality is the key. You cannot do this with just a few stars. You need many highly talented people to move from discovery to invention to spinout. We also need exceptional clinicians, because they are the ones who see the problems firsthand and can bring those real-world questions back to scientists. That is where the integration of clinical activity and research becomes powerful.
Where do you see untapped opportunity in Rutgers’ current life sciences ecosystem?
One example is brain and behavioral health. We have around $100 million in research on brain activity, and there is a lot of valuable work being done, including the development of new methodologies to understand the brain. But when I visited those researchers, what I learned was that the work was not tightly coupled with our clinical partner. If that remains the case, then however good the science is, it risks ending up only in journals rather than becoming patents, businesses, or real-world applications.
At the same time, we have a massive behavioral health presence, including 175 school-based partnerships dealing with behavioral health, and much of that is also decoupled from the science. That creates a major opportunity. We can connect basic neuroscience research to clinical applications for children and families in schools. Most institutions, especially major tech-focused ones, do not have that full pipeline from the bench to direct human application. Rutgers does. We can go from lab science to classrooms, counseling settings, and community-based care. We are only beginning to scratch the surface of what that could become.
Could you tell us more about the HELIX project?
Talent requires great tools. You do not win talent without providing world-class facilities, and HELIX will provide a modernized home for our scientists across the biomedical footprint. We are already using it as a recruiting tool. It will also be home to the medical school, which creates a major opportunity. If we integrate that closely with our health care provider, it strengthens our ability to recruit and develop physician-scientists and to build a much stronger academic medical model.
Another major advantage is that Nokia Bell Labs will be next door. That creates a very distinctive opportunity for collaboration with one of the world’s great scientific organizations. If I am recruiting someone and can say they will have a state-of-the-art lab in HELIX and can walk next door to have coffee with brilliant people at Bell Labs, that is powerful. Our aim is to bring together a real density of quality, foster cross-fertilization, and generate not only great ideas and inventions but also new businesses. On our side, that means we also must double down on our support for technology transfer and on helping people spin out companies.
If you could send a message to readers about why talent should come to Rutgers, what would you say?
Middlesex County, where the largest Rutgers campus is located, is going to become one of the most important places for biomedical sciences in the United States, and arguably the world. We are putting the physical infrastructure in place, we already have a significant density of talent, and we operate as an opportunity regime. We want smart people, and we want to create an environment where they can thrive.
We want their families, their children, and their ideas.
We want to incubate that talent and give people great opportunities to flourish. In 10 years, this county will be seen as one of the most important places for biomedical science in the country, and arguably in the world.
