Patti Perspective Spotlight: Dr. Bob McMahan
Dr. Bob McMahan has been President of Kettering University since 2011. “I have a career that only makes sense in the rearview mirror. You can only connect the dots in reverse,” he says. The interesting turns of his life and career have prepared him to be president of a university in a way that you could not have planned.
Dr. McMahan comes from a long line of entrepreneurial physicists. His father and uncle were among the founders of the commercial laser industry in the US. “We used to have Nobel Prize winners for dinner – and I had no idea,” he says. “I later saw them in textbooks and thought ‘Oh he liked roast beef.’” Growing up, he regularly walked through labs and facilities with the highest level of technology of the time. This included one of his father’s companies which produced ion lasers used by NASA’s Apollo program to measure the distance to the moon.
This inspired him to start out on the path of academia, studying astrophysics. After earning his Ph.D. at Dartmouth, he went on to work with Margaret Geller at Harvard University. While completing research there, he started a company that spun off some of the interesting technologies with electromagnetic sensors that he had been working with. (“These kinds of abnormalities run in families,” Dr. McMahan surmises.) At the time, university research and private business didn’t mix, so eventually, he had to choose between academic research and his business. He chose the business.
He packed up the company and nearly all of the employees and moved down to Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. After 10 years, the company had four operating divisions and was working around the world. They were working with commercial light instrumentation; advanced R&D for the Department of Defense and NASA; and biomedical applications. The company was acquired and Dr. McMahan took his skills to be the head of Global Engineering and R&D for the acquiring company, based near Zurich. It was a travel-intensive position that took him all over the world.
When he’d reached his fill of travel, he took a position back in the States in Rosslyn, Virginia for a venture capital firm, called In-Q-Tel. In-Q-Tel is not your typical VC. It is a national, not-for-profit, congressionally chartered firm, funded in part by the CIA. The goal of the firm is to invest in technology for the private sector that may someday be useful to the intelligence community. One of the first investments Dr. McMahan was involved with was a small, 5-person company called Keyhole. It was right around the time when PDAs were first starting to make a splash (pre-Blackberries) and their idea was to use these PDAs to access the national mapping repository in real time. This small company was later acquired by a company called Google for $3.5B. You know the product now as Google Maps.
After a while, with his family still in North Carolina, Dr. McMahan was ready to stop commuting to Virginia. The Governor of North Carolina asked him to join his administration as the Science Advisor to the Governor. This position was created in the 1950s at the same time as Research Triangle Park, with the joint purpose of re-engineering the state’s economy. It is a key advisory roles to the Governor. During his time in that position, he worked to coordinate resources throughout the state to grow North Carolina’s economy.
When the Governor’s term ended, Dr. McMahan left and started a new college of engineering at Western North Carolina, using some of the models of regional economic development that he had worked on in his role in the Governor’s office. A few years later, he got a call from an old headhunter friend. He told him “I’m not really looking, but I’ll listen to what you have to say.” By the end of that phone call, he was on his way up to Kettering University. Looking back, his path has prepared him well for university presidency, with experience working in academia, the private sector, and government.
What Dr. McMahan likes best about Kettering University is the students. “I’m not being gratuitous. I’ve been to many other institutions. They may have outstanding programs or similar orientations, but they can’t touch the students.” He mentions the maturity, poise, professionalism, and intensity as hallmarks of the student body. You can tell that he could go on all day raving about the students. One example he gives is about his office hours. “At any institution in the US,” he says, “you have students with gripes or ideas for improvement. In most places, a student will say “I have xyz problem. What are you going to do?” In six years at Kettering, I have never had a student come to me with a complaint without a whitepaper or proposal for the solution. It’s not for lack of sampling! I attend breakfasts, lunches, I’m in the hallways, I have an open-door policy, I have open office hours. In six years, I have never had a case of a student just complaining.”
One of the challenges he is facing in his current role is that the expectations – from employers and students – of higher education are changing rapidly. “Universities have always been evaluated on their inputs: SAT scores of the entering class, grants received, alumni contributions. Now, we are also being evaluated on our outputs: How many alumni are working in their field of study? How many are employable? What are their lifetime earnings? These hard metrics of performance are where we do extremely well.” The big challenge is to keep considering, how does a small, private institution best position itself to face these changes?
Having spent ample time with students who are just starting out, this is the advice he would give: “Don’t be afraid of failure. If you’re afraid to fail, you create a funnel for yourself; your options naturally narrow over time. If you’re not afraid to fail, then you have the ability to go in completely different directions.” To quote Charles Kettering himself: “It doesn’t matter if you try and try and try again, and fail. It does matter if you try and fail, and fail to try again."
When he’s not working, Dr. McMahan and his family love to travel. Every year they try a new National Park to hike. They are also avid fly fisherpeople. You can tell Dr. McMahan has a passion for a good challenge: he's an aerobatic pilot. “But not a very good one. That’s where I don’t take chances.”
He is amazed by the chances and changes that are taking place in industrial automation. He is especially interested in the capabilities and potential with collaborative robotics and assistive robotics and the convergence of needs and technologies with collaborative autonomous systems, autonomous vehicles, etc. “We are sitting at the very cusp of a whole new renaissance.”
