Sallie Keller-McNulty named new engineering dean at Rice

CONTACT: Margot Dimond
PHONE: (713) 348-6775
E-MAIL: mdimond@rice.edu

SALLIE KELLER-MCNULTY NAMED NEW ENGINEERING DEAN AT RICE

Sallie Keller-McNulty, group leader for the Statistical Sciences Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, will become the new dean of Rice University’s George R. Brown School of Engineering in July.

Keller-McNulty succeeds C. Sidney Burrus, who after seven years serving as dean is retiring from that position and as a tenured professor, but will continue teaching, writing and working with Rice’s new Connexions project.

”Choosing as an academic dean a group leader at Los Alamos may seem an out-of-the-box choice,” Rice President David W. Leebron said. ”However, engineering needs out-of-the-box thinkers, and Rice and its engineering school have them. Our search committee, chaired superbly by Dean Kathleen Matthews, produced an outstanding group of finalists, and we selected the best for Rice.”

Said Rice Provost Eugene Levy: ”We are thrilled to have recruited Sallie Keller-McNulty as Rice’s next dean of engineering. Sallie compiled a distinguished record of accomplishment and respect at Los Alamos and has built a strong reputation as an energetic and encouraging leader, wonderful at motivating others. She is also known for her ability to recruit and retain talented scholars.”

Keller-McNulty said she looks forward to her new position for many reasons, most of all the university’s collaborative culture — in particular the way the engineering school works closely with Rice’s Wiess School of Natural Sciences and the Texas Medical Center.

”Rice is such a pre-eminent institution — not just because of its undergraduate education, but also because of its fabulous research programs,” she said. ”Rice is leading the way in making interdisciplinary science a reality, and I’m a strong advocate for that as the way to move science forward in this century.”

Keller-McNulty will join Matthews, dean of the Wiess School of Natural Sciences, making Rice the only major research university with women deans in both science and engineering.

Keller-McNulty has served in her current position at Los Alamos since 1998. Under her leadership, the size of the Statistical Sciences Group increased from 13 staff members to more than 40, and the budget quadrupled. She also has established a thriving visiting faculty program with several renowned statisticians spending their sabbaticals at the laboratory.

Before joining the Los Alamos group, Keller-McNulty was professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Statistics at Kansas State University (KSU). A faculty member since 1985, she also served as director of the Statistical Design and Analysis Unit for the KSU Institute of Social and Behavioral Research from 1990 to 1998 and was an adjunct professor in the Computer and Information Sciences Department from 1989 to 1995.   

In addition, Keller-McNulty held a joint research fellowship of the American Statistical Association, National Science Foundation (NSF) and Bureau of Labor Statistics from 1996 to 1997 and served as program director for Statistics and Probability in the Division of Mathematical Sciences of the NSF from 1994 to 1996.

She was an assistant professor in the mathematics department at the University of North Carolina