College of Sciences selects new dean

Beginning Sept. 1, NC State’s College of Sciences will be receiving a new dean from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. William Ditto will be replacing Daniel Solomon, who served as dean since the formation of the college in 2013.

“Dr. Ditto is a highly cited physicist and over the course of his career has been a leader in discovery and innovation,” said Provost Warwick Arden. “We are looking forward to his leadership of the College of Sciences as it continues on a trajectory toward worldwide prominence.” 

Ditto is recognized internationally for the development of a new type of computer based on nonlinear dynamics and chaos, and his findings having been used to study new ways of controlling heart arrhythmias, seizures and epilepsy. Ditto is also looking at how technology can be used to innovate and enhance the student experience using virtual cohorts of students to connect freshmen, sophomores, juniors, seniors, graduate students, alumni, members of the business community and the general public to create a larger mentoring community. 

“NC State is one of a handful of institutions around the country that has the potential to really recreate public education that’s both a combination of the old school personal interaction that has a huge technology boost, but not at the expense of mentorship and personal interaction,” Ditto said. “I’m very excited about NC State. It’s a fantastic institution at exactly the right time in the evolution of public higher education. I could not be more thrilled. I just almost can’t wait to get there.”

Ditto said he hopes to develop a one-stop center that can handle advising students in a more holistic way, rather than referring them to the registrar or the financial aid office. A “concierge” would be able to advise a student throughout his or her college experience. The program is in the preliminary stage of development.

“Everybody talks about science and research, connecting the dots; we’d like to be able to connect the people together,” Ditto said. “We need to become much more people-centric in how we approach advising for the total student environment.” 

Ditto has also been a professor at Georgia Tech and led The Applied Chaos Labs, which has generated recent discoveries in reconfigurable computing, chaotic computing and astrophysics. He hopes to bring this science to NC State and continue doing research with it. 

“I am an active researcher in addition to being an educator and an administrator,” Ditto said. “But I always put the needs of the college first.”

Ditto decided to study education after his first week at the University of California at Los Angeles, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in physics.

“I just wanted to find out how the world worked, but then suddenly there was this whole community of people who wanted to learn things, and that’s something,” Ditto said. “I thought, what a great thing to do, is to both learn new things and discover new things but also to be able to share that. Where else in the world do 30,000 people show up every day to try and learn something new or to be educated?”

Ditto has been involved with building new programs, such as the College of Sciences, from the ground up. Before his tenure as dean at the University of Hawaii, Ditto served as founding director of Arizona State University’s School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering and was the Olin Chair of Biomedical Engineering. He served as founding chair for the University of Florida’s biomedical engineering department too. Further, he served as a founding faculty member of the joint Emory/Georgia Tech biomedical engineering department, and served as a physics professor at both Georgia Tech and the College of Wooster. 

Once his transition is complete, Ditto plans to teach astronomy and physics classes occasionally. 

“What I really like is to teach freshmen and sophomore classes — I think getting the hearts and minds and getting the excitement of what college is all about right at the beginning,”  Ditto said.