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A Q&A with Duke's New Provost

Sally Kornbluth goes from Duke lab leader to provost in 20 years

Sally Kornbluth, Duke's eleventh provost, meets with members of her lab team in the Levine Science Research Center. Photo by Duke Photography
Sally Kornbluth, Duke's eleventh provost, meets with members of her lab team in the Levine Science Research Center. Photo by Duke Photography

When Sally Kornbluth arrived at Duke with her husband in 1994, the molecular cancer biology duo was tasked with ordering supplies and finding graduate students for their new labs in the Levine Science Research Center.While construction workers put finishing touches on the lab space, Kornbluth, who was studying biological signals within cells, especially relating to cancer, prepared to fill the empty room with equipment, reagents, people and experiments. During those first days at Duke, she and her husband, Danny Lew, filled out grant after grant, pursuing funding for their research.“I think the best way to survive those early years when you’re just starting is to try not to think too much about the possibility that things won’t work,” Kornbluth said. “We were just very focused on getting the labs up and running and getting people in the labs and getting students to want to come to our labs.”Twenty years later, Kornbluth is Duke’s new chief academic officer. As provost, she leads Duke’s nine schools and six institutes, as well as admissions, financial aid, libraries and all other academic aspects of the university, from global strategies for Duke Kunshan University in China to Nasher Museum of Art programs.Kornbluth is the university’s eleventh provost and first woman to serve in the role. She receives about 300 emails daily, and her calendar is booked with back-to-back meetings, lunch appointments and speaking engagements. She meets with faculty and students on topics that range from presentations about the university’s strategic plan to online education committee discussions about encouraging innovation. She continues to teach graduate and post-doctoral students in her own laboratory within the Duke School of Medicine, where the team studies cell cycle progression and cell death. “I’m very, very interested in all the different things that go on in the university,” said Kornbluth, 54. “If you inherently like interacting with smart, interesting people and you find people interesting, there are endless opportunities for that every day here. The days are pretty much endlessly engaging. The one thing that I noted from my predecessor, Peter Lange, is that Peter always looked like he was having a great time, and I can see why. This is a really, really interesting, fun job.”Kornbluth sat down with Working@Duke to talk about her first few months on the job, future plans for the university, and how her 20 years at Duke prepared her to serve as provost.How have your roles at Duke (faculty member to cell biologist to medical school administrator) influenced you?

I’m very appreciative that there are wide ranges of opinions on almost every issue, and I try to listen to the scope of different people’s opinions and input when I think about making decisions. I think my experience as a medical school administrator for almost eight years gave me the ability to solve complicated problems with diverse groups of people. Even in my own lab, it’s a complex management issue because I’ve got all different sorts of people working on projects and I have to try to figure out how to get them all coordinated in moving science forward.

Sally Kornbluth in lab
Duke Department of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology's Sally Kornbluth, Anthony Means, Katharine Winkler, and Katherine Swenson, left to right, pose in Kornbluth's Duke lab in 2000. They discovered the first evidence of an enzyme, Pin1, that acts as an "emergency handbrake" on cell division.

What’s a typical day for you?Let me just open my calendar randomly to today. There are a lot of meetings, obviously, and talking to a lot of different people and keeping up with emails, but I’ll give you an example. (Kornbluth lists 12 meetings and commitments that day, from a Duke Kunshan University discussion to a budget working group committee meeting to a conversation with President Richard Brodhead.) It’s just a wide range of activities in very different areas, back-to-back, of people doing all kinds of interesting things, and I’ll say this: I am never bored. Sometimes a little tired by the end of a long day, but never bored.What are some current topics of personal interest?I’m interested in how we enable the faculty’s research and bring it to the next level, what sort of supportive things the institution can do to enable research in all areas. I’m interested in how you deepen the scholarly activities of the undergraduates. We already have 50 percent of undergraduates who engage in research. I’d like to see even more, but also just in terms of their coursework and extracurriculars, how things can be linked so they can have a really deep experience rather than a broad checklist kind of experience. I’m interested in how we address the issue of graduate training in an era where many of our Ph.D. students won’t become academics, so what we do to prepare them for alternative careers.What challenges face higher education?One obvious thing is continuing to articulate to the public the value of a university education, particularly the value of the humanities and interpretive social sciences. Obviously, how we incorporate online educational tools into our ongoing educational efforts. I think there are a lot of social problems of consequence that are being pressed across campuses right now. For instance, sexual assault – how we handle this, how we think about this, what the best practices and policies are around such issues. Affordability and access is critical: how are we going to maintain the ability to make sure that any student who really is qualified to come to Duke has a shot at coming to Duke? What role will online learning play in Duke’s academic enterprise?I think there are a lot of different possibilities. One is to think about putting together clusters of courses that convey Duke’s unique interdisciplinary flavor, sort of an online Duke brand that not only helps in societal ways to educate the world but also attracts people to Duke who are interested in those areas. The other is how we add online content to enrich our campus activities, whether it’s the flipped classroom or additional preparatory material or auxiliary material that might help students in learning. For the classes, there are unique possibilities with online education partnerships with, for instance, institutions globally where we might offer similar courses and have discussions between students across the world. Our faculty is very creative, and I’m hoping to find ways to maximize the opportunity for outlets for that creativity in online education.What’s your vision for developing a strategic plan for the university?I view this year as a pre-strategic planning year. We first have to define the broad themes that we’re interested in developing as a part of the plan, and I want to get input from faculty, staff, students and administrators, so I can get a feeling for where we’re heading, in terms of large buckets. Next year, we’ll be in a details-filling mode; what we need to put in those buckets, what specific programs, what specific plans, et cetera. I hope to make the plan modular enough that if we can’t do everything, we can do some significant things. I want to see what bubbles up from the faculty, students and staff before committing to one theme or another because I’m not hard-and-fast fixed on anything I like, and I want to hear through the process creative, new things that other folks on campus come up with. What’s challenging about being provost so far?You have to balance the interest of a lot of different groups, particularly with respect to resource allocation, and you have to make these decisions serially, and it’s not like you get to the end of the year and you consider everything. As they come along, you have to make decisions about whether you want to support them, invest in them, and that can be difficult. Sometimes you come across difficult faculty problems or student problems, and I think you really have to maintain a cool head and be objective about them. I find the engagement and support of everyone around here great, so I don’t deal with problems alone, in a vacuum. There are really strong people in a lot of positions, and my role is to interact with those folks and sometimes provide guidance to them and get guidance from them.Best advice you’ve ever received?‘You are what you are.’ I think you have to work within the constraints of your own personality and leadership style. It’s impossible to change how you fundamentally deal with people simply because you think it would be a good way to manage people or a good way to lead. You have to assess your own strengths and weaknesses and play to your strengths and do the best to mitigate your weaknesses; or better yet, build a strong team of people that have complementary strengths and can help to compensate for your weaknesses.