A New Path

Rodney Dyer

• 2 min read
A New Path
Photo by Kalen Emsley / Unsplash

So, the end of my administrative role at VCU has necessitated reconfiguring my activities, output, and duties. Here is a short timeline.

  • Act I (2004-2015): Primarily as a tenure track faculty member, teaching and doing my research. You can see my research activities from my Google Scholar Profile.
  • Act II (2015-2025): Served as Director of the soon-to-be disbanded Center for Environmental Studies, a Chartered Research Center with ~19 faculty and 250 students in undergraduate and graduate degree programs focusing on Environmental Studies. We performed a wholesale upgrade of all the academic programs and increased the quality of students and tuition revenue by over 150%. A new Provost decided it did not fit into his professional career trajectory—and put the programs and faculty into a general Biology unit with a student body of>80% pre-med/dent/etc.
  • Act III (2025+): This is where I am now. I'll be put back into a 9-month faculty position to determine what I'm doing and where I'm going.

So, I thought I'd simplify things a bit.

  • The "revisioning" of our academic units has also resulted in a wholesale removal of funds to support graduate students. So, I thought I'd put the older dyerlab.org website on hold since I'll likely not be self-funding a suite of graduate students in my lab.
  • I have plenty of population genetic data and manuscripts to handle me for the next decade at a reasonable trickle, even without additional grants and initiatives. As part of this, I have two user-facing applications to develop serving population genetic analyses (GeneticStudio.org) and another using Population Graphs for larger spatial genetic structure and genomic studies.
  • The decade of work in academic administration has allowed me to gain specific domain expertise in quantitative analysis of faculty and curricula. I'm working towards releasing a suite of software that targets this niche. The first application for this suite (fotj) focused on how we can help develop teamwork, participation, and belonging in training STEM field students. Additional offerings focus on faculty developing individual courses (backflow.studio), administrators focusing on course and faculty annual reviews (CourseEval), and higher-level administrative individuals tracking academic programs and curricula (Administravia.com). More on this to develop over the next few years.

So, here goes!