When Kevin Moore was a young associate professor at Idaho State University, he used to wear a tie to off-campus research team meetings. One day a colleague asked, “Kevin, why do you always wear a tie to these meetings?” Someone joked, “That’s because he wants to be a dean someday.”
The prediction came true on January 3, 2012, when Moore was officially named dean of Mines’ College of Engineering and Computational Sciences, a position he had been filling on an interim basis since the college was formed last summer. While Moore’s long-ago colleague might be surprised to learn the accuracy of his prediction, those at Mines who know him well see it as a natural fit.
“I can send an email to Kevin at any time of the day or night, and it is rare not to get a reply—and a follow-up set of questions—within about 5 minutes,” says Provost and Executive Vice President Terry Parker, who describes Moore as a strategic thinker with strong management skills and a broad understanding of academic disciplines.
A member of the former Engineering Division’s Executive Committee, Moore simply says that when the job came up, “I was a logical choice for the interim slot—I had actually been paying attention. It wasn’t until after a few months that I realized, ‘I can do this job.’”
His career certainly includes the requisite experience. Prior to becoming the G.A. Dobelman Distinguished Chair in Engineering at Mines in 2005, he was a senior scientist at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory. Before that, he was a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Utah State University, where he directed several multidisciplinary teams on autonomous robot development. In the mid-’90s, he spent a year serving as interim associate dean of the College of Engineering at Idaho State University. Along the way, he authored three books, more than three-dozen refereed journal articles, and over 100 peer-reviewed conference papers.
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