Many of the issues facing Johns Hopkins and its new provost
are obvious: the
affordability of higher education. Support for basic
research. Resources. The
need for interdisciplinary teams to attack the thorniest
problems.
Unfortunately, while the questions are obvious, the
answers are not always
quite so immediately apparent.
"I don't want to say too much right now. I know enough
to know what I
don't know, and it's a lot," Kristina M. Johnson said last
week.
But Johnson is diving right in to learn more. Just a
day after last week's
announcement that she will become the university's 12th
provost and senior vice
president for academic affairs, she was in Baltimore to
meet with staff and
begin setting objectives. By Sept. 1 — an unusually
quick turnaround for a high-level university appointment
— Johnson intends to be on the job.
"Kristina Johnson is a passionate, visionary, highly
accomplished teacher,
scholar and academic administrator," President William R.
Brody said.
"She has a keen appreciation for the extraordinarily
important role of the
research university in our society," Brody said. "She has a
deeply felt
commitment to our role as university administrators:
providing an environment
where students can flourish and faculty can go about the
business of making this
a better world."
Johnson said a provost's primary focus is academic
excellence and faculty
quality.
"Any great institution starts with the faculty," she
said. "They attract
the students. Along with chairs and deans, they do the
great work of the
university. My role is to look for opportunities to support
and promote our
outstanding faculty and staff.
"I'm looking forward to meeting the faculty as I have
the university's
extraordinary set of deans and directors," Johnson said. "I
want to be someone
who can help provide the resources that will allow them to
do their jobs even
better. I'm hoping to be a connector for deans and faculty
looking for
opportunities to further enhance their work."
Johnson, an electrical engineer with 40 patents and
more than 140 published
articles, has for the past eight years been the dean of
Duke University's Pratt
School of Engineering. She also is co-founder of several
start-up companies. She
will be the first woman to hold Johns
Hopkins'second-ranking position.
"I'm very excited," she said. "To have the opportunity
to serve a great
university at a broader level is extremely appealing."
Johnson said that one of her strengths has been
bringing together faculty
experts from a wide range of disciplines to attack
important problems from
different angles. As a faculty member at the University of
Colorado, Boulder,
she involved engineers, mathematicians, physicists,
chemists and even
psychologists in working to make computers faster and
better connected. As
engineering dean at Duke, she helped to set up
interdisciplinary efforts in
photonics, bioengineering and biologically inspired
materials, and energy and
the environment.
"If you look at being competitive as a country in the
21st century, the
problems are far more complex than in the past," Johnson
said. Advice from
economists and policy experts can help avoid scientific
advances from getting
ahead of society, she said. On the other hand, science and
technology have
important contributions to make in furthering the study of
the arts and
humanities.
"What better place to look at this kind of integration
than Johns
Hopkins?" Johnson said. "It's critical to the university as
a whole that we
have great liberal arts, great engineering and great
professional schools."
Johnson, 50, graduated from Stanford University in 1981
with both bachelor's and
master's degrees in electrical engineering. She earned her
doctorate at
Stanford in 1984.
"It was obvious from her time as a graduate student
here that she was
going to be something special," said Donald Kennedy,
president emeritus of
Stanford. "She has simply been outstanding at every level,
as a productive
scholar and as a stunningly talented academic administrator
as well. She and
Johns Hopkins will be a wonderful combination."
Johnson was on the faculty at Colorado from 1985 to
1999, earning a
National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award and
winning promotion to
professor. From 1993 to 1997, she directed an NSF
Engineering Research Center
for Optoelectronic Computing Systems run jointly by
Colorado and Colorado State.
Since 1999, when she became dean, Duke's Pratt School
has undergone
significant growth in both size and quality. Of 50 new
faculty members recruited
during her tenure, 14 have won early career "young
investigator" awards. The
undergraduate student body has grown 20 percent, and strong
graduate programs
have doubled in size.
Johnson oversaw planning, funding and construction of
the 322,000-square-foot Fitzpatrick Center for
Interdisciplinary Engineering, Medicine and Applied
Sciences. The school's research expenditures have tripled
to $60 million, and
the endowment has grown from $20 million to $200 million.
"Kristina Johnson has been a transformational dean of
engineering at Duke
and a lively contributor to the larger university
community," said Duke
President Richard H. Brodhead. "She is a person of great
positive energy that
inspires those around her. We'll hate to see her go but are
delighted to see
her talents recognized with these new challenges and
responsibilities."
Johnson is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and
Electronics
Engineers and the Optical Society of America. In 2003, she
was inducted into the
Women in Technology International Hall of Fame. In 2004,
she won the Achievement
Award of the Society of Women Engineers.
She is best known in research circles for pioneering
work in the field of
"smart pixel arrays," which has applications in displays,
pattern recognition
and high resolution sensors, including cameras.
Johnson succeeds Steven Knapp, the provost since 1996, who
is leaving Johns
Hopkins to become president of The George Washington
University on Aug. 1.
Donald M. Steinwachs, a professor in the Bloomberg School
of Public Health, will
serve as interim provost until Johnson's arrival on
campus.
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