Waldrop Sees Many Ways To Foster Research at UNC

A Morehead scholar with three UNC degrees, UNC's recently appointed vice chancellor for research is excited to be home.

And now that Waldrop is back in North Carolina, UNC's newest administrator is eager to familiarize himself with his new team of researchers.

"A personal goal of mine is to make sure I get to know faculty and students who are doing research here," Waldrop said. "It certainly will be a collaborative effort -- my first thing is getting to know the people behind it."

And the task has been delightful for the vice chancellor while he eagerly adjusts to being back on campus.

After spending 11 years at UNC earning political science, physical education and physiology degrees, Waldrop eventually took a post as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The last two years of his 15-year career at Illinois were spent serving as the school's vice chancellor for research.

Waldrop said his term at Illinois gave him the perspective he needs to approach his new position at UNC. "It's a different location, but I'm doing many of the things that I've done before," he said.

Waldrop was the point person for helping launch the University of Illinois' research park and worked closely with already established engineering and supercomputing programs.

And while his previous experience emphasized different programs than UNC's, Waldrop said he learned ways to apply his knowledge to UNC's top research programs. "Illinois and North Carolina have been about the same for the past decade," he said. "For the past couple of years, North Carolina has really jumped up there."

Instead of merely taking the helm and changing UNC's developing research programs and ideas, Waldrop said he would rather learn from the experts who have gotten the UNC this far in research innovations.

In particular, Waldrop is ready to get moving on development of the Horace Williams property, which he said will provide "incubator space" for new companies and promote additional space research for the state and nation. "I think there's tremendous opportunities there in many ways," he said.

Also on Waldrop's priority list is working with UNC's growing genomics program and taking what has already surfaced in that field to the next level.

"That's one where things are really laid out now," he said. "Nonetheless, I feel like that will continue to evolve."

Waldrop applies this philosophy to all of UNC's research programs, being careful not to only emphasize the most prominent. "A university is only as good as its weakest discipline," he said.

One way Waldrop aims to ensure research programs remain up to par is to reassess the school's institutional review boards, various monitors that review and analyze UNC's research trials and testing.

Although Waldrop said he hasn't looked into UNC's boards to the extent he would like to, he does have ideas for improvement.

"A number of faculty have mentioned that they would like things to be more streamlined -- to have one place to go. A faculty researcher should not be spending time dealing with red tape."

But among the ideas he has for UNC, Waldrop said the only way to make his initial year at UNC a productive one is to be open to every newly surfaced idea. "My overarching goal for the first year is to support the already outstanding programs on this campus."

The University Editor can be reached at udesk@unc.edu.