Venky said that he looked forward to working with Melton, even though Melton would not serve as a full-time dean.

“Obviously if we could have gotten somebody who would actually have taken the full dean title it would have been good, but you know maybe this is not a bad way of experimenting,” he said. “Right now, it’s very good that he’s going to do it—it provides some stability.”

While three outside candidates for the job visited in January during the search, including Randy Schekman from the University of California at Berkeley and Gerald F. Joyce from the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, Calif., talks with these candidates were ultimately unsuccessful.

“There’s a lot of mutual feeling out before anything gets officially offered or officially rejected,” Meister said. “It never proceeded far enough, I would say, to get the faculty involved.”

Venky said that while they were in talks with a number of outside candidates, no offers had been made.

“We looked at all the possibilities, then we went outside too, people say ‘you’ve got Doug Melton, you’ve got Andrew Murray, you’ve got some good people, you should be looking at them,’” he said.

—Staff writer Stephen M. Marks can be reached at marks@fas.harvard.edu.