FEATURES
Leader. Advocate. Fan.
NC State’s new chancellor, Randy Woodson, likes what he sees in the College of Engineering. A place among the nation’s top 10 public engineering schools, he says, is a next step.
Dr. Randy Woodson has seemingly been everywhere since he took over as NC State’s 14th chancellor in April. In addition to running North Carolina’s largest university, he’s crisscrossed the state meeting alumni and cheerfully and passionately shared his vision for NC State with students, faculty and staff.
Woodson comes to NC State from Purdue University, where he was provost and, before that, spent nearly four years as the Glenn W. Sample Dean of Agriculture. As a researcher, his groundbreaking work in plant science led to the development of molecular approaches to improve post-harvest storage and shipping of horticultural products, increasing the useful life for consumers.
Woodson grew up in Arkansas, the son of two teachers. He received his BS, MS, and PhD degrees in horticulture from the University of Arkansas and Cornell University, respectively. In his spare time, he plays guitar — mostly bluegrass and traditional mountain music. He and his wife, Susan, have three children.
The new chancellor believes the College of Engineering plays a pivotal role in the University’s overall success. NC State Engineering caught up with Woodson in June for his thoughts on the College’s past, present and future.
What are your first impressions of the College of Engineering?
It’s a great college, one of the best in the country. I knew that before I came here. Frankly, it was one of the attractors for me. And the College has a lot of potential to be better, not because the faculty aren’t good but because we need to continue to grow the faculty. It’s one of the largest colleges of engineering in the country, and we’ve worked hard on the facilities side, but it doesn’t have adequate faculty resources to be as strong as we really want it to be. But it’s a great college. World class.
Why are the research and education initiatives that go on in the College so important to North Carolina residents?
If you think about the real hotbeds of innovation in the United States, there are always three or four that are mentioned. There’s always Boston-Cambridge, there’s always Research Triangle Park and the Triangle area, as well as San Diego and Palo Alto-Silicon Valley. If you ask what creates an innovative environment, you’re always going to have world-class engineering education and research, world-class life sciences education and research, and world-class medical sciences. And we’re the engineering piece, we’re life sciences, and we’re just a critical driver for the economic engine that is this part of North Carolina and increasingly throughout the whole state.
You mentioned facilities. Why is the construction of Engineering Buildings IV and V on Centennial Campus so important to the College and the University?
This is a competitive world, and having the best facilities and space for our faculty and students to be innovative is critical to our success. And while we’re moving forward as an engineering college relative to the competition, the competition keeps moving forward too. And what we’re doing on Centennial Campus, I will tell you, is one of the things that brought me here. There’s no other campus like it in the country that marries academic space like we have in engineering with the business environment like we have with Red Hat and other private partners on Centennial Campus. So the continued construction and completion of our move of engineering to Centennial Campus is just critical to the success of the program.
You’ve said that the university needs to be strong in engineering, technology and science, perhaps even at the expense of some other NC State programs. Why do you believe that?
First of all, I don’t want to make this a competition, so my hope is that all boats can rise at NC State. But look, this is an institution whose history and future is built on science and technology and engineering, and to abandon that we couldn’t be as strong as we seek to be as a university. Now, engineering can’t be strong at NC State if we don’t have a comprehensive scholarly environment here. But when resources are limited, we have to make critical decisions about where we can invest, and we’re not going to weaken the programs that are critical to our sustained excellence in a very competitive global market.
Of course, my hope and my goal is to identify those critical areas across the entire university that need additional investments. But I just know that we cannot sacrifice strength in those key areas and have NC State prosper.