A Message From the Dean
Moving on All Fronts

In our drive to reach the summit of American research colleges, we are pulling out all the stops: recruiting the nation’s best senior faculty, competing seriously for top junior faculty, bolstering our support for graduate students, supporting our stellar undergraduate education.

But that is not enough. We must also leverage our USC resources, and we must leverage our Southern California location.

One good way to do this is through partnerships.

Forming partnerships is an effective method through which to augment and enhance the performance of both our senior and junior faculty. These partnerships expose us to fresh ideas and new viewpoints, and they provide venues through which we can share our expertise and philosophy with others.

Partnerships certainly aren’t new at USC College, nor are they rare. There are dozen of collaborations, ranging from joint ventures between two professors in separate USC schools to the Southern California Earthquake Center here at USC that involves more than 40 major research universities.

Whether internal or external, these partnerships run the gamut. For example, the Casden Institute for the Study of the Role of Jewish Life in America provides a venue for thoughtful people to address topics of prime import to the Jewish community. USC Neuroscience, which brings together scores of USC faculty in the College, on the Health Sciences Campus, in USC schools such as engineering and gerontology, and with colleagues at other institutions, offers a broad understanding of biological, cognitive and modeling approaches to brain structure and function. Throughout this issue of the magazine are descriptions of many of our current partnerships.

The evolving nature of research means that new partnerships are developing all the time. Just a few weeks ago, we formed an alliance for our humanities departments with colleagues at the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif. We all are very excited about this effort to create and sustain a community of international scholars to enrich the study of the period from the mid-15th to the mid-19th centuries. In addition, plans are in the works for an institute involving the Huntington Library with our humanities departments and social science department, which will focus on studying California and the West.

In all of these efforts, we are guided by a desire to share the wealth of the USC experience with other institutions, while bringing to our students and faculty the enriching assets of others in a synergistic endeavor that will help accelerate our drive to the top.

Joseph Aoun
Dean of the College
Anna H. Bing Dean’s Chair