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DANIEL McCABE | Having survived the budget cuts that hacked away at their respective faculties over the last several years, the newly-reappointed deans of medicine and science are gearing up for a much happier challenge in their second terms -- hiring people.

"We're all facing a retirement bulge over the next few years," says Dean of Medicine Abe Fuks about McGill's greying professoriate. "We need to renew our faculty and we need to start right now."

"We had 12 new professors join the faculty this summer," says Dean of Science Alan Shaver, describing the hiring spree as his faculty's first salvo in its "restocking program.

"The departmental chairs have been planning for faculty renewal all through the budget cuts. It was important to be ready to move at the first sign of relief."

With new professors comes the possibility of changing the character of their respective faculties. Fuks sees the new blood as an opportunity to develop into areas that are becoming increasing important -- genetic approaches to solving medical mysteries, the use of new medical technologies, finding novel methods for educating the public about health care.

Shaver says the new professors will make his faculty a more interdisciplinary place.

"I've noticed a tremendous breadth of ability," says Shaver of his newest faculty. "Many are joint appointments between two units. They're singlehandedly starting to bridge those units. There is more intellectual adventurism than I expected to see."

Shaver will spend much of his second term building new interdisciplinary links. A committee headed by physics professor Peter Grütter will look at McGill's various projects in materials science with an eye to developing new links between researchers from chemistry, physics, earth and planetary sciences and engineering.

Shaver is also floating the idea of another collaboration with engineering -- a new building where computer science and electrical and computer engineering professors could work together. Shaver notes that both the government and industry are anxious for more graduates from these programs. He wonders if they might be willing to invest in a new, thoroughly modern building where students could have access to more professors and better facilities.

Shaver has another new building in mind. This edifice would unite his faculty's life sciences professors -- from biology, microbiology and immunology, psychology, biochemistry and physiology. New interdisciplinary research projects and graduate programs would be encouraged as a result.

"It dovetails nicely with the McGill University Health Centre project," says Shaver, who sees his professors as playing a large role in the MUHC's research endeavours.

The MUHC, of course, looms large in Fuks's mind. "We'll be working closely with them over the next few years," says Fuks. As the MUHC plans for its new heath centre complex in the west end of the city to be built by 2004, Fuks says the responsibility of ensuring that McGill's teaching and research programs in medicine make a smooth transition into their new quarters rests with his faculty.

Both men expect to have more fun in their jobs over the next few years.

Asked for the high point of his first term, Shaver replies, "Getting through the cuts with an intact faculty." He says it's "a testament to McGill's academic spirit" that, even during a cash-strapped period, a bold new initiative such as the McGill School of Environment, of which his faculty was one of three founding partners, was still successfully introduced.

"The high point for me has been in working with the people in this faculty," says Fuks. "Dealing with the [cuts] hasn't been easy. We've been faced with uncertainty. But we still do a wonderful job in attracting research grants, our research is still outstanding, we still graduate impressive young people into the health professions.

"Now we're poised to enter into a period of renewal."

Renewal in ways that even Fuks didn't envisage. Along with Quebec's other medical schools, McGill received word late this summer that the government wanted them to train more medical students. "We received all of a month's notice. It's great that the government wants more doctors, but we need the resources to do that."

But the news on the funding front is good in other respects. The Canadian Foundation for Innovation is offering millions to help equip new professors' labs and support large-scale research efforts, Quebec's granting agency FCAR, has a new program to provide funding assistance for the hiring of new faculty and the new Canadian Institutes of Health Research promise to channel more money into health-related research.

"There are tremendous opportunities out there for us right now," says Fuks. "We have to take advantage of them. We've done well in CFI [applications], but we have to do better."