Moving in

The bookcases in his office are still empty and the packing boxes full, but Dean Currie has hit the ground running. Caltech’s new vice president for business and finance started in February, but began “researching” his new employer the month before. The Texas native spent some time in the Institute archives, because, he says, “I needed to somehow find a way to inject Caltech into my veins. Because it’s the culture of a place that takes the longest to really understand.”

And while Currie acknowledges feeling a bit overwhelmed when he first came to Caltech, it was that very culture that quickly made him feel at home. “It’s really a very easy community to come into; people are very welcoming. I like the idea that this is a place where, at least on the core campus, you can come to recognize the faces you see.”

Currie comes from Rice University in Houston, where he held a similar position for 16 years (“Caltech is only my third employer, but I think it’s good to get ‘repotted’ once in a while,” he laughs), so having been born, raised, and employed in Texas you might expect to find him wearing the obligatory boots and ten-gallon hat. But his Texas inclinations were tempered by a long stint on the East Coast, where he attended Harvard University, obtaining an undergraduate degree and his master’s, then serving as associate dean for administration and policy planning at the university’s graduate school of business. His daughter, Sarah, is a junior there. Currie recalls giving her guidance on life as a Harvard undergrad, until, he says, “she gently reminded me my advice is 35 years out of date.” Currie’s son, David, a Columbia University graduate, is headed to law school in the fall.

Still, once a Texan always a Texan. In commenting on an award he received some years ago at Rice, he complemented his staff, saying, “There is an old East Texas saying, ‘If you find a turtle on a fence post, you know that it had some help getting there.’” He brings the same down-home philosophy to his new Caltech post, which financially oversees everything from the Athenaeum to Human Resources to the Office of Sponsored Research. “In the long run, I hope to have the best group in the country supporting the Institute’s core missions of teaching and research,” says Currie. “Excellence is indivisible; you can’t choose to be great as an institution and be mediocre in other areas, and I want to maintain that excellence.

“Everything we do here has to be related back to those missions. That can range from how easy can we make it for a principal investigator to see where he stands budgetarily, to how can they hire the people they need quickly and efficiently,” he says. In the short run, he adds, “I need to try and understand, working with the president, the provost, and the division coordinators, how to gather the unrestricted resources we need to support the research activities that are so exciting here at Caltech.

“This is a place of original genius,” he says, “and I want to do what I can to nurture that.”

Currie continues to acclimate himself to California in general and Pasadena in particular. His wife, Carol, is back in Texas, readying their Houston home for sale. They have not purchased a house here yet, says Currie, but he has learned (and likes) the phrase “nonfreeway commute.” As an avid hiker he looks forward to exploring the local mountains, and as an avid reader he has an “amateur’s enthusiasm” for lay science books.

And while everything out of Texas purports to be big, when it comes to ego Currie leans in the other direction. He was at first reluctant to be interviewed, citing another Texas bromide: “My Texas-born daddy told me, ‘Son, remember that it is better to be discovered than found out.’”

Then there is Carol, who, he says, always keeps him grounded. After receiving her PhD in public health last year, Currie congratulated her. “I told her that from now on, instead of being Mr. and Mrs. Currie, it will be Mr. and Dr. Currie. And she said, ‘that’s not quite right, dear. It will be Dr. and Mr. Currie.’”
•