Today, UNC Chapel Hill announced my new appointment as the chancellor's senior advisor for strategy and innovation. In this new role, I will help the Carolina campus develop multidisciplinary research initiatives and oversee an expansion of RENCI.Today, UNC Chapel Hill announced my new appointment as the chancellor's senior advisor for strategy and innovation. In this new role, I will help the Carolina campus develop multidisciplinary research initiatives and oversee an expansion of RENCI.
As the chancellor’s senior advisor, my mandate will be to help catalyze wide-ranging campus initiatives – the kind of big research and academic ideas that can have transforming benefits for North Carolina and the world and that require multidisciplinary collaborations and advanced technology. Such initiatives will be instrumental to fulfilling the goal Chancellor Moeser announced in his September 2006 “State of the University” address, raising UNC Chapel Hill’s externally funded research portfolio to $1 billion/year by 2015.
Not surprisingly, this objective dovetails nicely with the RENCI vision and statewide mission to be a catalyst for innovation. I believe RENCI can provide the technological infrastructure and expertise that are vital for making breakthrough discoveries, at UNC Chapel Hill, in North Carolina and across the United States.
Operationally, RENCI will be integrating research computing, storage capabilities and new technology initiatives from UNC Chapel Hill’s Information Technology Services (ITS) to create a major “RENCI at UNC Chapel Hill” engagement site that complements the RENCI anchor site and our other engagement sites at Duke, North Carolina State, UNC Asheville and East Carolina University. These changes will increase RENCI’s staff count to nearly 100, creating an advanced research infrastructure to support the campus and RENCI’s statewide virtual organization.
I am excited and humbled. Great things are afoot.
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