Dr. Sanders Williams, senior adviser for international strategy, will leave Duke in March for the Gladstone Institutes, just as the international outposts he helped plan transition from blueprints to reality.
Williams, Medicine ’74, who is also Duke Medicine’s senior vice chancellor for academic affairs, will serve as president of the non-profit biomedical research center affiliated with the University of California, San Francisco. The center specializes in research on heart disease, brain disease and deadly viruses.
With two senior administrative positions, Williams divides his attention between educational, research, clinical and administrative functions at Duke. Leading the Gladstone Institutes will give him the chance to return to what he calls his first love: biomedical research.
“I’m ready for a tighter focus on science,” he said. “It will be a change for me to be more engaged in research on a day-to-day basis.”
Williams said he was not looking for a new job when he was approached about the position over the summer, but he quickly realized he was ready to take on such a role.
“I think most senior administrators reach a point in their career where they would like to be president,” he said. “I’ve loved my time here at Duke. This is my chance to be the top person at a place of real excellence.... It’s much smaller than a university research enterprise but still large enough to do important work.”
Provost Peter Lange said Williams’ departure will be a loss for the University.
“He discussed the possibility [of leaving] with me well before he accepted,” Lange said. “I gave him the advice that I absolutely hoped that he wouldn’t take the job, but that he was at a point in his career when he needed to decide whether he would take that step or not.”
Lange said he and President Richard Brodhead will look both internally and externally to fill Williams’ two posts, noting that they will not necessarily be held by the same person.
Williams began taking the lead in internationalization as the founding dean of the Duke-National University of Singapore Graduate Medical School, which was the University’s most complex international venture at the time of its launch in 2005. Williams said he is confident the school will soon be known as the “best of its class.”
“I felt the major roles I’ve played for Duke were all reaching a point where I could pass those duties off to a new person without compromising Duke’s position,” he said. “I think that organization has progressed to a point where it’s fine without me.”
Yet just last year he was appointed Duke’s first senior adviser for international strategy, and Williams noted that the newness of his role gave him pause before accepting the Gladstone position. The Fuqua School of Business’s five-site global network—one of his primary projects—is still in the formative stages.
“I’d say there is some reluctance about leaving that, but this is a long term project—I would have left it at some point in any scenario,” he said. “I hope people will feel good about my contributions in global strategy even though it didn’t last for many years.”
Williams advised Fuqua Dean Blair Sheppard on how to facilitate institutional collaboration at the overseas sites and was involved in negotiations with partners for the Chinese site. In the Spring, Williams and several other administrators will travel to Kunshan, China, where the University will break ground on an educational facility, providing the project has received the Board of Trustees’ OK.
Nevertheless, Lange said Williams’ departure is not ill-timed.
“The timing is actually fairly good because I’m hoping that we will have some agreements in place before he goes that his successor will work on and we won’t be on the precipice with the others,” he said.
Lange added that Duke will continue to turn to Williams for his advice even after his departure, noting that he will only be a phone call or e-mail away.
Williams said it will be hard for him to leave the University, as Duke has become very much a family affair. He met and married his wife at the Gothic Wonderland, and all of his children have attended the University at some point during their educational careers. Williams’ parents made a gift valued at $1 million to fund the R. Sanders (Sandy) Williams Medical Scientist Scholarship Fund in his honor.
Williams arrived at Duke for the first time in 1970 and circled back twice more to serve as a faculty member and later as an administrator. He has spent 26 of the last 40 years in Durham.
“It’s always been my practice once every 10 years to re-evaluate my career direction,” he said. “I’ve been back at Duke nine years this time, and [Gladstone Institutes] just seemed right.”
Although he is 61, Williams noted that his career may yet include another stop at Duke.
“This in many ways is our home,” he said. “I will serve [at Gladstone] for a period of time and do well for the institution, I trust. But at the time of retirement or when I decide to do a job other than a senior leadership role, I might well return to Duke.”
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