Well, first of all, until the early 1990s, the department had been two separate departments. Originally we were a separate department of biology and a department of biochemistry. The biochemistry department didn’t have that many students; it was more of a research department. The biology department was significantly larger and had a much larger teaching mission. The dean of our college decided it was silly to have these two separate administrative structures, so he decided to fuse the departments. First he made Arnold Eskin chairman of both departments, and Arnold’s mandate was to fuse the two, which was not easy at first because they didn’t entirely want to be fused. They had distinct cultures, and dramatically different teaching loads. But Arnold was the right guy at the right time to do that.

What happened is that some of the professors were near retirement age, and they took early retirement. One or two others never got tenure. One left to become chairman of another department. And so some of the senior faculty, who were not all that productive, left for various reasons and we were able to recruit new faculty. And here’s the interesting part: we didn’t really increase our size that much. Right now there are only 33 of us, which isn’t a lot considering the university has 36,000 students. But we were able to recruit a bunch of new people. And what we decided to do was recruit in our areas of strength. Build up a critical mass in certain areas, and that’s been the strategy we’ve followed ever since.

We recruited new faculty at pretty much all levels and we did it very successfully. We recruited junior faculty, some mid-level faculty, and some senior faculty. I was one of the senior faculty. And we built a synergy that you wouldn’t believe. I suspect, for instance, that at least a portion of that citation increase can be attributed to a couple of papers Paul Harden and I wrote for Nature in 1999 and 2001. And that was just a pure synergy of recruitment. Two fellows brought to the faculty over a period of time were interested in similar kinds of problems, but worked with totally different techniques and different systems and were able to forge a collaboration on circadian regulation of the olfactory system that has been just amazing.

Well, the other thing that makes a difference is that the department now has a bunch of people who are publishing papers in journals like Science and Nature and Cell, as well. But I really think it was accomplished by just really good faculty recruiting. The thing about it is we didn’t necessarily go out to steal people who already had high visibility in their fields. Just about everybody that came here got better after they got here—I’m an example of that myself. And you wouldn’t think a place like the University of Houston, because we’re not that well known, would be the kind of place where that would happen.

First of all, it’s being willing to fail in faculty searches. That’s one thing. We had several faculty searches in which we ended up not hiring anybody. And it’s about looking specifically for people who will work together. And not just scientifically, but who will even work together socially. There’s an element here of people who are just excited to get to work in the morning, because we like our colleagues.

Yes and no. You hear a lot these days about interdisciplinary programs being a big deal, and that’s true. But most of the citation power coming out of our department is pretty much entirely internal to the department. In other words, most of the papers getting the big citations don’t have that many non-University of Houston authors. Or if they do, they are not necessarily significant players on the paper.

What has happened is the upper administration has allowed us to recruit and have given us resources to make reasonably competitive offers, and then we’ve simply been really good at finding people we know would be happy here. That’s not so easy. That has sort of been the philosophy: try to find good people you know will be happy. There are a lot of ways to make faculty happy—and isn’t always just money or having a big shiny lab. It’s knowing that somebody will have really good colleagues, right next door, and that they will be working on similar problems, but perhaps with different techniques. So you can have these incredible conversations by the coffee pot. Money is good. It can be a wonderful thing; it greases the skids, but even when you don’t have a whole lot of it you can build something. But we have to build smart. Places like Harvard, it’s not so crucial for them because they have lots of money. Even within Houston, we have tremendous biomedical sciences: we have three other major institutions within the city—actually four if you include Galveston. And it’s probably safe to say that all of them have resources we can only envy. So recruiting for us may be more challenging than it is for them. We have to look at things a little differently. We have to be really careful. We can’t really go after big science here. We have to go after smart science. Set-up packages here are on the low end. In the past we’ve actually decided that even if some particular scientist accepted the job we offered them, they might not be happy with the culture of science at the University of Houston. The culture of being successful at a place like this might elude them and they would quickly be frustrated and unhappy. So we haven’t really recruited people who specialize in techniques so much, people who use widgets. We have really focused on people who are focused on fundamental biological questions.

There’s one other thing here, a very powerful thing, and Arnold Eskin deserves a lot of credit for this. We have in place now a really detailed mentoring system for junior faculty, and we take it seriously. This is another advantage of hiring faculty in just a few areas of biology and biochemistry on which we really focus. When new faculty comes in, they are assigned a faculty mentor who works in a closely related area. And your job as mentor is to read your mentees’ grant proposals, for instance, and make sure that you shepherd them through the grant process, and shepherd them through the tenure process to the extent you can. So you help them get funding. You help them get tenure.

I see the department using the same strategy of building to its strengths. We have three areas we focus on: one is molecular microbiology and infectious disease. Another is molecular neurobiology and neurogenetics. And the third is theoretical and experimental evolutionary biology. We’re going to continue to build on those three areas, and to expand those spheres to the point where they begin to overlap. Again, we’re looking for synergies—we’re always looking for synergies. For instance, there are now five of us who work on circadian rhythms. We have five people in the same department in the same building working on this, talking to each other all the time. It’s kind of a small area to have such a focus, but it works. And so we will continue to build to our strengths.

The other thing we’re doing and will continue to do is cast our faculty searches very broadly. We’re trying to cast as big a net as possible. Because that way you can go in search of new faculty thinking you want someone who’s working one particular area and you pull in someone totally different with your net who fits in perfectly but is doing something for which you never thought to search. We’ve a missed a few opportunities in the past by writing our ads with too narrow a focus, and so now we’re casting very broad nets. That way we can build both science and the diversity of the faculty at the University and not be at the mercy of a very small applicant pool.