ntering the Harvard Square hangout known
as Pinocchio's, you're confronted with the requisite menu of pizza
variations, the requisite photos of sports teams, and a framed testimonial.
An article from The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, provides
the testimonial; it reports on Harvard's having lured a leading
Stanford researcher in "sub-micron electronic technology."
He turned down tenure at Stanford in favor of Harvard's offer.
According to the article, the decision between the two "came
down to intangibles" while the physicist was visiting Cambridge.
It quotes him as recalling, "I was having pizza with my son
at Pinocchio's and everything just felt right." Pizza is, of
course, very tangible. Other elements of the environment are less
so: "For me, it's the perfect job. You don't have to wear a
tie, you can keep your own hours, and as long as you're smart, you
can be as weird as you want."
At Duke, the issue of what it takes to attract--and keep--faculty
has been brought into sharp relief with the February announcement
of a gift of $25 million. The gift, from Ginny Lilly Nicholas '64
and Peter Nicholas '64, is the largest the university has ever received
directed specifically for the faculty. By matching new contributions,
the gift is expected to yield a total of $75 million over the next
two years. Those new funds will go toward "faculty development,"
a category highlighted in "Building on Excellence," the
university's strategic plan, that includes professorships, directorships,
and curatorships; research grants, sabbaticals, and leaves; and
the infrastructure of teaching and research.
Inhabiting the relatively new infrastructure of the Levine Science
Research Center, Alex Hartemink '94, though hardly new to Duke,
is a new assistant professor of computer science. As an undergraduate,
he majored in mathematics, physics, and economics; he never took
a computer science course. Later, he went to Oxford as a Rhodes
Scholar, earning an M.Phil. degree in economics. In the fall of
1996, he began a doctoral program in electrical engineering and
computer science at M.I.T. He finished the Ph.D. last summer.
Hartemink, who focused his Oxford efforts on choice and preference
in economic theory, considered career paths in industry, consulting,
and even politics. But he was drawn finally to academe--to the idea
of devoting himself to wrestling with ideas. In his job search,
he investigated top-ranked programs in computer science. The advertised
Duke opening was in artificial intelligence. His own work concerns
computational methods for processing and interpreting genomic data--data
that point to what the make-up of our genes is, what the expression
of those genes results in, how genes change over time. The department
ended up hiring a Stanford professor in artificial intelligence
and making an "opportunity hire" of Hartemink.
One of the selling points for Duke was an initiative in genomics.
Gradually, that initiative is becoming visible in new bricks and
mortar, programs, and research directions. "This was pretty
central to the way in which the university was going to grow in
the next five, ten, twenty years," Hartemink says. "I
was looking for an academic research institution that was extremely
supportive of the direction in which I was going--in particular,
genomics--coupled with a place that sort of felt like home. Not
home in the sense of a return, although that's how it played out
in my case. But a place where I felt comfortable with my colleagues.
"As a young guy, I'm at a point where I'm exploring. So going
somewhere different would help me expand my horizons and perspectives.
On the other hand, I had an exceptionally good time at Duke as an
undergraduate. In addition to the kinds of undergraduate experiences
that I never had any hope of reliving, I just knew the tone of this
place. I knew the ability of the administration and the faculty
to do amazing things with comparatively fewer resources than a lot
of our peer institutions. When I visited Duke and they espoused
certain commitments or intentions, I had a lot of confidence that
they really meant it. At other places, I wasn't really sure if it
was just talk."
Compared with other disciplines, computer science is more a buyer's
market. So the places vying for Hartemink showed plenty of flexibility
in order to be competitive in salary. Guarantees of research support,
he says, were equally alluring--the kind of support that pays for
travel to professional conferences, which are important arenas for
young faculty. This winter, he attended the Pacific Symposium in
Biocomputing in Hawaii, and other conferences are on the near horizon.
Hartemink wants to guide (and attract funding for) a diverse team
of graduate students. He says one reason for his hiring at Duke
is his enthusiasm for collaboration within and outside the department,
including graduate students and colleagues in areas like biology,
medicine, and engineering. And he has a computer scientist's eagerness
for equipment--encompassing everything from purchasing a laptop
computer to outfitting an entire lab. "The nice thing is that
the department has an excellent computing infrastructure. So it's
not the case that every professor needs to go buy his or her own
supercomputer. Eventually, if the things that I'm working on are
really successful and the amount of data becomes large, I will need
to compute on very fast machines with vast amounts of memory."
Computer science professor and department chair Alan Biermann
says Hartemink's application signaled an "incredible opportunity
in computational genomics just at a time when Duke wanted to grow
in this area. So the deans decided to go for it, and we were able
to entice Alex into coming, even though he had very attractive offers
elsewhere. Alex's coming has been as big an event as we had expected."
Thomas Crowley has made a career of sifting through large quantities
of data, though his concern is not with genetic goings-on but with
the patterns of the planet. It was a serendipitous encounter that
brought Crowley to Duke last fall as the Nicholas Professor of Geology
and Earth Sciences. At a meeting about three years ago, a colleague
mentioned that Duke was searching to fill the new chair. Crowley
called up Paul Baker in Duke's geology department, whom he had known
through professional circles, and was encouraged to apply.
As a Ph.D. student at Brown, Crowley studied sediments and fossils
to understand changes in ocean circulation. He went on to teach
college courses aboard U.S. Navy ships, collaborate with a climate
modeler at the University of Missouri, direct the National Science
Foundation's Climate Dynamics Program, serve as a research fellow
at the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, and join a private consulting
firm. At Texas A&M, he was professor of oceanography and deputy
director of the Texas Center for Climate Studies.
He works with his mathematician wife, Gabi Hegerl. "Because
my wife is a professional scientist, we were interested in what
type of arrangements Duke might make for her," Crowley says.
"And they were, I felt, very open-minded, generous, and flexible
in the way they dealt with that." Hegerl is now an associate
research professor in the Nicholas School's Earth and Ocean Sciences
division.
"Even though I am a geologist, I had worked for a physics
department, an oceanography department, I had worked for the government,
but I had never been an employee of a geology department,"
Crowley says. "What I do is some geology, but I also do a lot
on modern climate. People with those types of interests sometimes
fit in well in geology departments. And sometimes they're a little
bit out of step. So it was important for me to see if this type
of science meshed well with the rest of the department. Really,
there are not many earth and ocean sciences departments in the country
where I felt it would be possible. This wasn't just people being
polite to a newcomer applying for a job. This really was genuine;
it felt that we were connecting well with the people we were meeting
at Duke."
Just as Hartemink picked up on a commitment to genomics, Crowley
perceived an institutional interest in global change. "And
it's really global change, not just climate change. We're changing
the chemical makeup of the atmosphere and of the oceans, and we're
cutting down trees all the time. All of those things will fold into
a comprehensive research program."
"I'm very interested in interactions with different groups
of people," says Crowley. "Climate is a very interdisciplinary
science. It includes geology, oceanography, meteorology, physics,
and statistics, and it spills over to public policy along with all
the environmental sciences. I wasn't just interested in doing my
own research. I could have done that at Texas A&M; Texas A&M
gave me a very generous counteroffer. But I wanted to do more, to
interact with people on interdisciplinary topics. I also like the
idea of knowledge transfer, of bringing a message from pure science
to the general public."
Duke provided what Crowley calls "a generous start-up package,"
much of it going to purchase equipment from his former operation,
carve out space in the Old Chemistry Building (which is "going
to be filling up," he points out), and bring on one member
of his former research team. The biggest expense in his computer
modeling work, he says, isn't in hardware but in staffing. He says
the modest-scale operation he prefers would involve the collaborative
efforts of research scientists, two or three graduate students,
possibly a post-doctoral student, and a couple of undergraduates.
"We don't have to worry about giant computing facilities for
our own research, although there are some available. The financial
burden is really salaries for people, people at the support level
and at the Ph.D. level, because a lot of the work is analyzing results--analyzing
huge volumes of data. Some of the research we do is covering the
last thousand years or so. Then we're doing another project where
we're looking at the climate of the Earth from 300 million years
ago."
For Crowley, helping to manage a climate center at Texas A&M
became a less-than-sunny task. "We just didn't have the resources
nor the time to really do what we wanted to do." He says he's
likely to be happier as a researcher than an administrator--particularly
as a researcher with a chaired professorship. "It's nice to
be a chaired professor; it feels nice to be recognized. I think
it's an opportunity for more interaction than you might have had
otherwise, and also to be able to contribute more. Because, let's
face it, you have a little bit more clout."
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