Calling it a day

Rob Carlson and his wife Vicki enjoy his retirement celebration held on campus in May.

After serving 10 years as dean of Cal State San Bernardino’s College of Natural Sciences, Rob Carlson will retire Aug. 1. A national search for a new dean will begin this fall.

“Without question, Rob Carlson has been an extraordinary leader and he’ll leave a rich legacy,” said Albert Karnig, president of CSUSB. “He’s had remarkable impact on the College of Natural Sciences, as well as the overall university.”

Part of the legacy that Carlson is leaving is the construction of the new Chemical Sciences building, the renovation of the Biological Sciences building, and the successful campaign to raise $1.7 million to construct a CSUSB observatory, scheduled to be completed this year. A new nursing lab also has been built and is offering students the latest technology to train nurses.

Carlson also developed key partnerships with hospitals and others to increase the supply of nurses. He helped introduce the campus’s first engineering program – in computer engineering. And Carlson was pivotal in securing contributions from donors to build the observatory without use of public funds.

Carlson’s leadership, Karnig added, has been apparent in the development of the university’s President’s Academic Excellence Scholarship, a program for students in the top one percent of their high school graduating classes.

“The college has had an astonishingly high percentage of its graduates gain entrance into Harvard and other top medical and graduate schools across the country,” Karnig said.

Carlson came to CSUSB in 2001 from San Diego State University, where he had been a professor and chair for the department of exercise and nutritional sciences since 1978. Before his work at San Diego, he was at the University of Texas-Permian Basin and at the University of Kansas.

David Maynard, a professor of chemistry at Cal State San Bernardino, will become the interim dean when Carlson steps down. He’ll serve until the national search for a new dean is completed. That search begins this fall.

Maynard has been chair of the chemistry department at CSUSB for the past 12 years. A product of Southern California universities, he earned a B.S. in chemistry in 1976 from Cal State College San Bernardino, as it was known then, an M.S. in chemistry and a science/math teaching credential from Cal State Long Beach in 1988. In 1992, he finished work on his Ph.D. in organic synthesis at the University of California, Riverside. The next year he returned to CSUSB, landing a teaching post in the chemistry department.

Since he began his career at the university, he has been awarded the Student-Athlete Council Award twice, the College of Natural Sciences Outstanding Faculty for Instructionally Related Activity honor, the Outstanding Faculty Advisor for a Campus Organization honor, a McNair Scholar Mentor award and the 2002 Distinguished Alumnus Award for the College of Natural Sciences.

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