The Field Museum's New Provost

(Crain's) — Neil Shubin has a three-pronged approach to his new position as The Field Museum's provost.

"Recruit, recruit, recruit," said the 45-year-old, who studies the evolution of limbs and who was also appointed associate dean for organismal and evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago. "My agenda is to bring the best minds here as curators."

As provost, the equivalent of a university's top academic officer, Mr. Shubin's priority will be to build a staff that enhances the museum's research reputation and public image.

"When people go to a museum, they see the exhibits," Mr. Shubin said. "What they don't realize is that behind the exhibits are 30 to 40 PhD faculty members who do research. We have a large research institution behind the scenes. That's the hidden part of the museum that people don't see."

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Mr. Shubin will have a $15.6 million budget to oversee the collections and research departments of anthropology, botany, geology and zoology. He will report directly to John McCarter, Jr., president and chief executive officer.

Cultivating the right staff can contribute to a museum's longevity, said Phil Nowlen, head of the Getty Leadership Institute, which is affiliated with the J. Paul Getty Museum. While marquee programs such as Pompeii and Tutankhamun are non-staff produced, in-house generated exhibits such as the Evolving Planet are important to help draw visitors to the rest of the museum year after year.

"There's a lot of competition for America's leisure time," Mr. Nowlen said. "All museums compete with the Bulls, White Sox and The Sopranos for the way people spend their time."

Mr. Shubin replaces Robert Martin, who is taking a full-time research position at the Field Museum as A. Watson Armour Curator of the Department of Physical Anthropology.

Before Mr. Shubin starts beefing up the Field Museum staff, he will take a six-week expedition to hunt for fossils 600 miles south of the North Pole. Mr. Shubin recently gained attention for his work on finding the tiktaalik roseae, a 375-million-year-old fossil said to show how sea creatures evolved to land inhabitants. His international fame is sure to assist him in his recruiting efforts.

His first order of business when he gets back to Chicago is to meet with Field Museum staff to discuss recruitment strategy and direction.

"We need a vision," he said. "You can't hire everyone."

Provost positions, typically found at universities, are not unusual at research-intensive museums such as the Field Museum, Smithsonian Institute or American Museum of Natural History.

In his dual role with the museum and the university, Mr. Shubin will spend roughly one to two days a week working with curators at the Field Museum and the rest of the week running University of Chicago's evolution program.

Born in the outskirts of Philadelphia, Mr. Shubin spent a significant portion of his childhood digging in sandboxes and dirt. While studying biology at Columbia University, he said he considered going to medical or veterinary school or pursuing a doctorate degree in paleontology. He enrolled in Harvard University for graduate school and while working on an excavation in 1982 in Arizona, collected a 200-million-year old fossil. Fourteen years later, that fossil was determined to be the first frog.

Mr. Shubin earned his Ph.D. in organismic and evolutionary biology from Harvard in 1987. He has completed field research in Africa, Greenland, Morocco, China and South America where he has uncovered the earliest forms of salamanders, frogs and other mammals.

His research with tiktaalik began in 1998, but it wasn't until 2002 that his team was able to find fossil parts. In 2004, the research tem discovered an entire fish fossil. Their findings were published in April and now Mr. Shubin has new-found fame to help make connections with various schools.

"The thing I like about it the most is that I can crack open a rock and design an expedition and discover something that I can share," Mr. Shubin said.