AUSTIN
Dr. Francisco Cigarroa, a pediatric transplant surgeon, is preparing for his toughest challenge ever.
On Monday, he takes over as chancellor of the sprawling University of Texas System, where officials are grappling with complaints about soaring tuition costs, a growing battle over admissions policies and a hurricane-ravaged medical school and health center in Galveston.
For Cigarroa, 51, it's just another chance to exceed expectations.
"Challenges really don't dissuade me from pursuing important opportunities," Cigarroa told The Associated Press. "If you're an optimist, you see opportunities, and that's the way I've been brought up."
He will be the first Hispanic to preside over a major university system in the U.S., which Cigarroa calls a high privilege and heady responsibility. Dr. Cigarroa is a nationally renowned pediatric and transplant surgeon and was most recently president of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio,
He earned a bachelor's degree from Yale in 1979 and received his medical degree from The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas in 1983. Dr. Cigarroa was chief resident at Harvard's teaching hospital, Massachusetts General in Boston, and completed a fellowship at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
The Laredo native is the son of a doctor who still practices medicine and a disciplinarian mother who insisted on straight A's at school and good behavior at home. With nine siblings, everything was a competition growing up, but Cigarroa recalls lighter moments with his grandparents across the border in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. He visits his mother-in-law there frequently.
As chief executive officer of the UT System, one of the largest employers in Texas, Cigarroa will help administer an operating budget of $11.5 billion and preside over 15 campuses with more than 194,000 students.
Cigarroa's prowess on the operating table is legendary, but his new job will take him away from his beloved profession and into what is perhaps an even dicier arena: politics. Putting the brakes on tuition increases has emerged as one of the top issues in the Texas Legislature, but UT officials are hesitant to give up their autonomy to raise rates, a power lawmakers gave them during a state budget pinch in 2003.
