I worked with Celia Hooper when I was tapped by my home institution to be the Interim Founding Dean of a newly created College of Health Sciences while my institution searched for the permanent Founding Dean.

This was all new to me–the role and the college itself! My provost, who had worked with Celia Hooper under other circumstances, reached out to see to engage her as a mentor to me during my transition year. This was an absolute life saver! Celia and I established a regular face to face meeting scheduled, interspersed with phone calls and emails. She shared resources from her own time working with academic restructuring helped me to serve in this limited time role with steadiness. By the end of that year, she also helped to be to leverage my time as an interim into a new position as permanent dean at another institution. Celia continued to offer guidance and wisdom when I transitioned to that new institution which included a change in context from public to private higher education. Celia has a gift for leadership–developing leaders and being a leader. She helped me to develop the new college while she also helped me to develop as the new dean. I couldn’t have done it without her!