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Last week, a decade after University President Neil L. Rudenstine reinvented the role of the Harvard provost, Steven E. Hyman became the fourth man to fill that role. And with the University's number two office at a historical crossroads, the best indicator of the direction in which he might take it is the interfaculty initiative he once directed: Mind, Brain and Behavior (MBB).

Like his boss-to-be, Lawrence H. Summers, Hyman, currently the director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), won't be a familiar face in Harvard Yard when he arrives. But interfaculty initiatives, the hallmark of the provost's office under Hyman's predecessors, were designed to prompt academic collaboration between the University's disparate parts, and MBB—arguably the crown jewel of those programs—has his fingerprints all over it.

"The faculty in very diverse disciplines realized that they needed each other," Hyman says. "That's something I'd like to build on."

"I think that was a particular challenge demonstrating his leadership because it involved engaging senior faculty from non-scientific disciplines in an initiative that was clearly grounded in neuroscience," says Harvard Medical School Draper Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience Joseph T. Coyle, who chaired the psychiatry department when Hyman was a professor there.

Though the provost's office has worked since its inception to unite Harvard's oft-divergent faculties, unifying the University remains a top item on Summers' agenda. And many point to Hyman's role in the MBB program as a sure sign that he's the right man for the job.

"He brought together scholars from a wide range of disciplines, many of whom did not even know that they had interests in common with each other," says Albert Carnesale, who was Harvard's provost in MBB's early days.

McLean Hospital President and HMS Psychiatry Professor Bruce D. Cohen says the NIMH post and the provostship require similar approaches.

"You have a variety of different constituencies and you're trying to pull them together to reach a greater vision," Cohen says.