Vanda McMurtry is settling into his new house near the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He and his wife have finally moved their belongings from their former home in upstate New York. Only their two dogs still remain with family on an estate near Ithaca.
For Penn's newest vice president, Philadelphia is slowly starting to feel like home.
McMurtry -- who arrived at Penn earlier this month -- is now in charge of government and community relations for the University, having served in a similar position at Cornell University for the past year. He fills the position left by Carol Scheman, who stepped down from President Amy Gutmann's executive team last July.
With McMurtry's appointment, Gutmann's executive team is finally complete.
When Gutmann came to Penn last year, one of her first priorities was to assemble a group of advisers to help push her agenda forward.
"The team is a mixture of seasoned Penn people and very highly qualified new people," Gutmann said. "That's an optimal mix."
McMurtry's appointment filled the last major hole -- of which there were once several -- in the group of Penn's top administrators.
And now, Gutmann and her staff can turn their attention away from recruitment -- a process Joann Mitchell, her chief of staff, called "pretty time-intensive" -- and get down to work.
After her first few months at Penn, Gutmann appointed Craig Carnaroli -- a seasoned Penn administrator who has worked at the University since 2000 -- to a new position as executive vice president.
Gutmann quickly reassembled the rest of Carnaroli's financial team, making former Wharton administrator Scott Douglass the vice president of finance and treasurer and promoting University administrator Bonnie Gibson permanently as vice president for budget and management analysis.
Gutmann had to look further to find the rest of the University's senior administrators.
While Mitchell had worked in Gutmann's office at Princeton University and came to Penn with her in 2004, John Zeller took over as the new vice president for development and alumni relations about one year ago. He was recruited from a similar post at Johns Hopkins University.
Finding a provost to replace Peter Conn -- who served as interim provost during Gutmann's first year -- took a little longer.
Gutmann eventually decided upon Ron Daniels, who came to Penn from the University of Toronto Law School this summer, after a yearlong search process that screened more than 60 applicants.
With so many new faces, simply getting to know the Penn community is first on many of the new administrators' lists.
"There are literally scores of people with whom I should sit down, talk, get to know," McMurtry said. "The list is extensive."
As intense as the acclimation process is, Gutmann said she expects her team to get to work right away.
"Anyone coming here has things to learn, but his learning curve isn't particularly steep," Gutmann said of McMurtry. "He's hit the ground running."
With Gutmann's team complete after her first year as president, she will now be able to spend less time seeking out new administrators and more time putting her plans into action.
Gutmann will now "be able to really focus and devote the energy she had toward searching and making sure she had a strong and complete senior team," Mitchell said. Her agenda "will just continue to move forward because she will now have the time she had been devoting to searches."
