Rhea Law, interim president, University of South Florida - Tampa Bay Business Journal - The Business Journals
Lifetime Achievement Award Winner
As interim president of the University of South Florida, Rhea Law holds top leadership positions with many Florida-based organizations. She has been actively involved in corporate, public policy, civic and charitable efforts for her entire working life.
It is a career that spans five decades and includes a long list of gubernatorial appointments, including the first (and only) woman to serve on the inaugural Board of Trustees for USF, as well as the Board of the Florida Council of 100, the public policy liaison with Florida’s governor, cabinet, legislative leadership and Supreme Court.
She is the former CEO and chair of Fowler White Boggs, where she led the Tampa law firm’s 2014 merger with Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney. Her expansive law career included practice in higher education, economic development, government, environment and land use, leading to thousands of acres of mixed-use projects around Florida.
She is a yearslong champion for economic development in the region, having chaired both the Tampa Bay Economic Development Council and the Tampa Bay Partnership.
Her board work is expansive and includes service on boards at Tampa Electric Co. and Peoples Gas. She chairs USF’s Health Professions Conferencing Corp., which operates the Center for Advanced Medical Learning and Simulation in downtown Tampa.
Root causes
When asked where she found a passion for leadership, fearlessness and action, she cites innate curiosity fostered as a kid by her parents and Italian immigrant grandparents.
Her parents worked, and she spent a lot of her early life with her mother’s folks who immigrated to Tampa from Bari and Sorrento, Italy. She saw her father’s parents every Sunday in Sarasota.
“I learned a lot of the importance of family of faith and the way you conduct yourself from them and their understanding from the old world,” she said. Other kids had typical toys, but she carted around a microscope. “I am an intensely curious person, and I always wanted to look at things and figure out what made them work,” she said.
Her first path was biology and chemistry. But college “wasn’t exactly in the works” early on, she said. She landed a job in USF’s research and grants office in 1968, where she discovered she earned six credit hours every semester she worked there. The “best job ever” allowed her to interface with the smartest people in their fields, she said.
“They would have to explain to me what they wanted to research, and I would look for funding sources and help them write the proposal,” she said. “The money would come back, and I’d administer it.”
Her mentor, USF geologist Dr. William H. Taft, encouraged her daily, she said, pushing comfort levels in everything from public speaking to exotic foods. She worked there for 10 years, taking classes at night and handling all grants and contracts.
Starting, no scratch
Eventually landing in business administration at USF, she took some business law classes, and it clicked. She didn’t have the money to go to law school but realized her retirement account at USF was vested. She cashed it in, worked on the side, and when she graduated, she had just $200.
“It was that narrow,” she said.
She got a job before she applied for one at a small Tampa law firm, Dixon Lawson & Brown, which eventually merged with Fowler White, where she would become its CEO.
“I’ve never applied for a job. I didn’t apply for this one.”
At USF, she’s having a blast. And she is getting things done and making an impact in a short time. She is bringing a pragmatic, informed, hands-on approach to needs around USF’s consolidation, direction and focus. Her to-do list has 137 things.
Before she was approved, she was at the Sarasota-Manatee campus for a town hall meeting. It needs a dorm and a student center.
“I said, ‘OK, I’ll charge a committee to come together and identify what it would take in order to do that. And let’s just go do it.’”
In her current role, she can bring relationships nobody else has, she believes.
“I don’t know how long I’m going to be in this position, but my connections with the community, the ability to actually form alliances with industry and companies of different kinds to integrate our students with the job creators here in the Tampa Bay area, our opportunities are off the charts.”
source: https://www.bizjournals.com/tampabay/news/2022/03/11/rhea-law-interim-president-usf.html
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