Executive Session with Dr. Neset Hikmet

Executive Session with Dr. Neset Hikmet

The new director of The University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee's Center for Research in Healthcare Systems and Policies

PERSONAL

AGE: 50

FAMILY: Married with two daughters, 22 and 15, and a son, 16.

HOMETOWN: The Island of Cyprus in the Mediterranean. Moved to Turkey as a teenager, then Columbus, Ohio, in 1980.

WHY DID YOU MOVE TO TURKEY? "The Middle East is war torn and Cyprus was no different. My father moved my mother, sister and I to Turkey for our education, and he stayed and ran the business."

WHAT KIND OF BUSINESS? "He was a general merchandise importer. If you needed a tractor he would drive to Germany, England or Italy and find the tractor you needed and would import it for you. In his store, one section would have tires; the other section would have hardware, tiles; another section would have lumber. If you needed it, you got it. If he didn't have it he'd get it for you.

"So my entrepreneurial, adventurous side stems from my father, and his father was a merchant so it was the trade of the family."

EDUCATION: Bachelor of science, civil engineering, Middle East Technical University, Turkey; MBA and doctorate in management information systems, University of Rhode Island.

THAT DOESN'T SOUND LIKE FAMILY TRADITION: "My father wanted to be a chemical engineer, but, of course, according to tradition, my father had to work for his father. Because of that my father had this yearning towards education.

"So when I was asked, 'What are you going to be when you grow up?' My answer would always be, 'An engineer because my father wanted to be an engineer.' "

WHY COLUMBUS, OHIO? "In the '80s, inflation was high and interest rates were even higher, so when I came into the country and started looking for a civil engineering job, no one was hiring, especially a fresh immigrant."

WHAT DID YOU DO? "I opened a small store and bought Turkish carpets. It then dawned on me that with high inflation and high interest rates no one's going spend money on luxury things. So I had a store full of Turkish carpets.

"I started to get bored so I found a data entry job from midnight to nine o'clock at Bank One. It was a computer job ... it had the IBM mainframe and big storage systems. ... It was very fascinating actually working with computers because back at the university we only had one computer.

"Suddenly I saw an ad in the paper for value added resellers for Seiko, they used to manufacture (computer) systems back then. I flew to Las Vegas and said I would like to be a vendor and they said, 'Do you have a store? And I said, 'Sure I have a store, a carpet store.' So by the time I got the dealers license I was selling the carpets wholesale."

PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND

POSITIONS PREVIOUSLY HELD: Spent 12 years in Ohio running his business before returning to college in Rhode Island. First taught as a graduate assistant during an MBA program, then taught at Northeastern University in Boston before moving to Florida. He has been with USF for four years. In addition to his job as director of the center for research, he's also an assistant professor of information systems at USF Sarasota-Manatee.

WHAT ABOUT YOUR CONSANT MOVING? "I call myself the nomad. I joke with my wife, get the camel ready and roll up the carpets we're moving again. And that's fitting because my genealogy comes from central Asia and Genghis Kahn, and so my journey started in central Asia and kept moving west. So next I think we're going to California and from there back to China."

CHALLENGES

IMMEDIATE CHALLENGES: "Finding more faculty to come down and work with us because we're a small campus that's growing fast. The second challenge is we don't have a home yet ... Hopefully, once we leave campus and it's completed, and we have a more definitive space this will say who we are physically. Of course, other challenges boil down to financial, budget allocations. This is funded by research dollars. The challenge is more in the resources than the issue at hand."

- Adam Hughes