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Catching the ASU Buzz
by Barby Grant
Initially, Rob Page had no interest in being director of the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. He was perfectly happy chairing the entomology department at the University of California, Davis, where he had earned his Ph.D., in 1980, and been a tenured faculty member since 1989.
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“When I was first approached by people
at ASU, I thought, ‘Uh, why would I want to leave Davis?,’” Page
recalls. Urged to at least consider the opportunity, he decided, “Well,
maybe I’ll take a look.” |
| SoLS Director Robert Page |
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Describing his first trip to ASU to interview for the job, Page says, “It was interesting. It seemed like there was a level of excitement that people had. The second trip was even more interesting,” he adds, “because I saw a real enthusiasm. I talked to staff and I talked to more faculty, and it became sort of infective. I started feeling like, ‘Gee, there’s something really special going on here.’”
Sufficiently impressed, Page found himself accepting the appointment as director of ASU’s School of Life Sciences (SoLS), effective May 1. Now he has the task of advancing an organization that has been in existence for less than one year to a position of national leadership in the rapidly changing arena of the biological sciences.
“I think that the opportunities here with SoLS are amazing,” exclaims Page. “If you look across the country right now, everybody is retrenching and decreasing. Here it’s going in exactly the opposite direction.”
While managing an existing faculty of just over 100, Page will be responsible for hiring up to 40 more over the next two to four years. He finds that one of the most appealing aspects of his new job.
“To have that kind of an opportunity to make an impact on an institution is a rare event,” he says. “The people who are hired in over the next two to fours years are going to be here for 20 to 30 years, long after I’m gone. It’s a chance to do something that is going to impact life sciences for a long time.”
Page already has had a significant impact in the scientific community, through his research on the evolutionary genetics and social behavior of honeybees. In the 1990s, Page and a group of collaborators were the first to map a single gene responsible for the insects’ complementary sex-determination system. The work was featured on the cover of the journal Cell last summer. In subsequent studies, Page and his team have gained further insight into the regulation of honeybee foraging, defensive and alarm behavior.
Although Page expects to maintain an active research program at ASU, it will be on a smaller scale than at UC, Davis. Only about half of his 200 to 300 hives of honeybees will move with him to Arizona.
Instead, the primary focus of his attention will be leading the School of Life Sciences, which was formed last July 1 through the merger of the departments of Biology, Microbiology, Plant biology, and the Graduate Program in Molecular & Cellular Biology. Although he has yet to work out the nuts-and-bolts of his plan for the school, Page says the overall vision is clear.
“The vision is to build a School of Life Sciences that benefits the people of the state of Arizona,” he says. “My job is to settle in and make it work."
“It’s going to work through attracting the best faculty we can and giving them every opportunity in the world to succeed,” he explains. “And we’re going to expect them to build the kinds of research programs that will bring recognition to ASU and directly affect the quality of life of people in Arizona.”
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