{"id":1868,"date":"2007-01-16T16:44:33","date_gmt":"2007-01-16T21:44:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/?p=1868"},"modified":"2014-12-16T16:45:23","modified_gmt":"2014-12-16T21:45:23","slug":"engineer-helm-emory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2007\/01\/engineer-helm-emory\/","title":{"rendered":"An Engineer at the Helm of Emory"},"content":{"rendered":"\"12\"<\/a>\n

\u201cEngineers are immersing themselves in society\u2019s needs and goals more than ever,\u201d says James Wagner \u201978, PhD \u201984. \u201cThey are going deeper and deeper into society and I think it\u2019s a good thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

As president of Emory University in Atlanta, Wagner oversees the university\u2019s nine academic divisions, which include Emory College; a graduate school of arts and sciences; professional schools of medicine, theology, law, nursing, public health, and business; and Oxford College, the school\u2019s two-year undergraduate division. Wagner has 12,100 students and 2,635 faculty members under his care.<\/p>\n

It should come as no surprise to many that when Wagner, who earned both his master\u2019s in clinical engineering and PhD in materials science and engineering at the Whiting School, approaches the challenges of running a major university, he falls back on the engineering approaches he honed at Johns Hopkins.<\/p>\n

For instance, Emory recently confronted a seemingly intractable parking problem on campus. As opposed to simply building more parking garages, Wagner says he used the problemsolving skills he learned as an engineer to refocus the question in order to get a better answer.<\/p>\n

\u201cInstead of figuring out how to get more cars onto campus, we looked at how to get more people onto campus,\u201d he says. The resulting program uses incentives to encourage the use of motorcycles, carpools, public transport, and vanpools and offers rewards to those who give up their parking spaces.<\/p>\n

Wagner is often asked how his engineering background contributes to his role as a university president, especially since Emory doesn\u2019t include an engineering school. His response: \u201cHypothesis driven leadership is imagining a solution and building an experiment around it. That translates very nicely to administrative functions: identifying administrative problems, putting policies into place, and evaluating how they work.\u201d<\/p>\n

And those principles were gleaned from his experiences as a student, teacher, and administrator. After completing his graduate work at Hopkins, Wagner served on the Whiting School faculty and as chair of the school\u2019s Materials Science and Engineering Department. He left Hopkins after 13 years to join Case Western Reserve University in 1998. There, he split his time serving as the engineering school dean, university provost, and interim president. In 2003, he accepted the presidency at Emory.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt used to be that engineers solve engineering problems,\u201d Wagner says. \u201cNow engineers identify quality-of-life issues, translate them into engineering terms, and then solve the problems. We\u2019ve transitioned from being just problem solvers to being problem identifiers who then solve the problem.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cEngineers are immersing themselves in society\u2019s needs and goals more than ever,\u201d says James Wagner \u201978, PhD \u201984. \u201cThey are going deeper and deeper into society and I think it\u2019s a good thing.\u201d As president of Emory University in Atlanta, Wagner oversees the university\u2019s nine academic divisions, which include Emory College; a graduate school of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1869,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research-development","issue-winter-2007"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAn Engineer at the Helm of Emory - JHU Engineering Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2007\/01\/engineer-helm-emory\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"An Engineer at the Helm of Emory - 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