Editor's note: This is the second in an occasional series looking at University deans who have been appointed at Carolina in the recent past.

It's hard to leave a place you love, Robert Blouin will tell you.

And he should know. He has done it twice.

The first time was in 1975, when he left New England to earn his doctor of pharmacy degree at the College of Pharmacy at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

He was lured to Kentucky by a pharmacy program that was then, and remains, one of the strongest in the country. But family and friends looked at him as if he were crazy.

"Why would you want to leave New England?" they asked him.

Everything is here, they said: the mountains, the ocean, Boston, and along with it, the Bruins, Celtics and Sox.

One of the other people he had to convince was his wife, Maureen F. Daly. She had been a fellow student at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy in Boston. They got to know each other as members of the same carpool barreling down I-93 from towns north of the school.

They shared many of the same dreams, for a family, for a career in pharmacy, for a rich life in New England.

"When it comes to making such a big personal sacrifice, which both my wife and I made, I promised her that the sacrifices would be worth it," Blouin said. "She said, `Fine, but make sure you are doing things that you couldn't be doing somewhere else.'"

ROOM TO GROW After an illustrious career at the University of Kentucky, Robert Blouin made the move to become dean of Carolina's School of Pharmacy because of its excellence -- and the challenges it presents.

When they finally left for Kentucky, they both assured family and friends that after a few years they would return to live out their lives.

He finished his degree in 1978, the same year that their daughter, Colleen, was born.

But instead of going home to Boston, Blouin accepted an offer to become an assistant professor on the faculty at Kentucky.

The few years they had bargained for stretched to four, then five, then 10. Their son, Daniel, was born in 1987, or what was year 12 on the Blouin career calendar.

But in each of those years, Blouin said, he could look in the mirror and honestly tell himself that he was where he needed to be, doing what he couldn't do anywhere else, which had been part of the deal he had made with his wife.

In 1984, he was named associate professor and a member of the graduate faculty and the associate director of the Drug Product Evaluation Program. A year later, he was named a member of the toxicology graduate faculty and a member of the core faculty for a Geriatric Education Center Grant.

He likes to say that he had the fortune of having four careers at Lexington without ever having to change his phone number -- as an academician, a teacher, a researcher and finally as an administrator.

But he would not take his first administrative job until his 22nd year at Kentucky.

He loved to teach and had been a productive researcher and had not felt any compelling reason to give them up. But he found himself drawn into questions of how to deal with administrative issues more by design than chance. Often, those questions would arise in conversations he had on long Saturday runs with a friend in administration.

These friendly discussions also gave him an opportunity to indirectly shape policy -- and get himself noticed as someone who had a knack for making sound suggestions.

In 1997, when the dean of the school called to offer him the job as associate dean of research and graduate education, he knew he was ready -- and knew the job was right.

The pharmacy school produced the talent and peoplepower to fuel and drive a pharmaceutical industry, and state government leaders understood this, Blouin said. In his new administrative role, Blouin worked with state government as well as other universities and private corporations to develop initiatives aimed at strengthening the school's role in economic development.

In all his years at Kentucky, he had carefully developed a five-year plan of where he wanted to be, what he needed to be doing to further his career. That didn't change after he got into administration -- except that now any five-year plan would problem necessitate going someplace else.

Leaving Lexington, they knew, would be as hard as leaving New England had been more than half a lifetime ago. What once had been a lonely career outpost had become home. The pharmacy school was ranked third in the country -- and going almost anywhere else could end up being a step backward.

To make giving up what they had worth it, they agreed to the same deal they had made with each other years before.

They had to go someplace that would be a good place to live, at a university that had a good to great academic reputation, a school of pharmacy that had potential and where hard work could make a difference.

Eventually, the phone began to ring with outside offers that Blouin could not justify taking. Then he heard the dean's position at Carolina's School of Pharmacy had come open. And that is how in 2003 Blouin for the second time in his life moved from a place he loved to come to Chapel Hill -- for an opportunity that for him seemed like a perfect fit.

Challenged anew

Now, after some months on the job, Blouin said he could not have better matched his own strengths and weaknesses to the strengths and weaknesses that exist at the school he now runs.

"I just knew that this was the place for me and knew it from the standpoint that is exactly the kind of situation I'd like to come into -- a great university with a great tradition of excellence, filled with strong schools and outstanding departments that bring that critical mass of intellect to the table."

Blouin said he also came to a pharmacy school that excelled in professional education at graduate levels, yet still had room to grow in the vital areas of research and scholarship.

"We are a school -- because of its location and because of what institution we are a part of -- that has an opportunity to be excellent not only in professional and graduate education but also excellent in research and scholarship and make a significant and meaningful contribution in the areas of intellectual property and economic development," Blouin said.

Another strength of the school is the alumni who have been so generous to it through the years. What he has learned as a new dean is that the key to fund raising is not asking for money but building relationships. By the end of June, Blouin had traveled to every part of the state, sharing his vision of where he wants to take the school and trying to get people as excited about that vision as he is.

"Our alumni have such great fondness for this place and want to give something back because this University really means something to them," Blouin said. "To justify their giving, there has to be a level of trust. As I've traveled around the state, my goal is not so much to pursue these relationships from an economic perspective. I'm really interested in pursuing the relationship from an intellectual perspective and as part of a joint partnership where an individual can help us accomplish our goals. Part of it is my vision, but part of it is incorporating their vision for this school into the school itself."

And it is a great time to be in pharmacy, Blouin said.

"You can't get away from it. You pick up a newspaper, or `Time' magazine, or watch the commercials for the Super Bowl, and you will read or see something about drugs or drug therapy," Blouin said. "It's pervasive. Not all of it is good, but most of it has been viewed by society as important -- important for improving the quality of life, important in terms of extending life, important in terms of optimizing resources to get the most out of life."

Blouin sees a natural evolution in the pharmacist's behind-the-counter role from merely executing a doctor's prescription to advising a person on the right option not just in terms of costs but the long-term benefits of the drug as measured by long-term effects.

Society, through HMOs and other third-party insurance companies, has focused attention on reducing the unit drug costs to the lowest common denominator, Blouin said. In the future, Blouin envisions pharmacists playing a more active consultative role where other important factors are weighed into the total cost equation, such as side effects that could result in more time lost from work, or reduce the chances a person could overdose or under dose and end up in an emergency room.

It's not that people today don't have access to information. To the contrary, because of the Internet and the constant barrage of advertising, people are more awash with information than they ever have been before. But in many respects, the range of choices has only added to more confusion and indecision.

"We want to be able to train our pharmacists to be able to assist the health-care enterprise in making these types of value judgments," Blouin said.

Blouin sees a future where there are probably fewer pharmacists out there, but those who remain will practice at an extraordinarily high level and be paid not only for the products they sell but the advice they give in choosing them.

Importance of research

Old habits die hard even in new places, and Blouin's habit of developing a five-year plan has now been extended to the school he runs.

At the core of that plan is raising the school's level of research and scholarship.

"I would be selling my own faculty short if I did not say that we have outstanding scientists and scholars within the school," Blouin said. "What we have lacked is the capacity -- not the quality of people."

But in the modern competitive environment -- where state legislatures see university research as engines for economic development -- it has become increasingly hard to attract and keep scientists based on the reputation of a university, even one as good as Carolina's.

His goal was for the school to add 75,000 gross square feet of research space -- the extra elbowroom needed to meet the school's aggressive plan of doubling its research capacity in five years.

The good news is this shortage of space will soon be solved -- thanks not to the nearly completed renovations of Beard Hall but to the two full floors of the $101 million Genetic Medicine Building that has been dedicated to the School of Pharmacy for research space.

Construction on the new building is supposed to begin by this December or January of 2005, and the school could be occupying the building as early as December of 2007 or the spring of 2008, Blouin said.

Blouin said when he was first called about the pharmacy school being included in the building, the offer for was one floor. "By the time the conversation was over, I said, `Why not two floors?'"

Two floors would provide the 75,000 square feet of space Blouin had envisioned. What makes the project even more exciting is the location, he said.

"When you think about what draws a faculty to a university, space helps, but opportunities for collaboration are becoming increasingly important in attracting and retaining outstanding people."

The academic neighborhood, so to speak, will include not only the genetics and genomics faculty, but the departments of biochemistry and pharmacology, and centers for cancer, neuroscience and bioinformatics will also be nearby. Such proximity, Blouin believes, will invite more cross-disciplinary collaboration than ever before.

Blouin said the goal for the University's School of Pharmacy is not to be better than other pharmacy schools -- but to not only recognize but embrace the multi-dimensional scope of the mission it is charged to fulfill.

"We have to provide pharmacists to the state of North Carolina as the other schools do, but we also have an obligation to provide scientists for the Triangle. We also have an obligation to create new knowledge and advance our discipline and science within the academic community.

"It's not a question of trying to be equal," Blouin said. "We are different, and we are different by our core mission and because of all the things we must do to be a responsive, contemporary school of pharmacy in the state of North Carolina at the University of North Carolina."

Blouin said he thinks giving up all he had in Lexington to come here will be worth it. He has found a challenge and an opportunity he knows he could not find anywhere else -- and that is why he feels so confident this place is right where he belongs.