NSU president to step down in 2025. His successor is already set.

After more than a decade of serving as Nova Southeastern University’s president and CEO, Dr. George Hanbury will step down in January 2025, when Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Dr. Harry Moon will take over.

NSU’s Board of Trustees finalized and approved the succession plan at its Thursday meeting. Board members unanimously voted for Moon to become the seventh president and CEO, and the change will take effect Jan. 1, 2025, the university said in a news release.

Before Hanbury became president in 2010 and CEO in 2011, he served as the university’s executive vice president and COO for 12 years. He will continue to serve the university after stepping down, as chancellor and creator of a new Institute of Citizenship, Leadership, and International Affairs, the university said.

The South Florida Sun Sentinel reported in 2016 that the university had a goal for 2020, called Vision 2020, to be recognized by then for its excellence in innovation, teaching, research and service. Hanbury said Thursday night that NSU successfully met all aspects of that goal, and despite the pandemic, focused on Vision 2025, which includes the goal for NSU to be designated a preeminent research university.

Hanbury has been with the private university since 1998. He said he has known the end of his contract was approaching in January 2025 and has long kept that in mind with every new leadership hire, always searching for a mentee who could become a successor.

“It helps with stability, and the organization and the university and continuity, and when you help to create a single shared vision that everyone is in, it’s not dependent upon one individual, it’s dependent on culture,” Hanbury said.

Under Hanbury’s leadership, NSU became one of 59 universities nationwide to be designated a “high research activity” and a community-engaged university by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. NSU also became the third university to have two medical schools, and he oversaw the building of the $50 million NSU Guy Harvey Oceanographic Center, which opened in 2012.

“Somebody needs to be able to carry on the culture” within the university, Hanbury said, which is why he recommended an internal successor rather than a national search.

There will be a national search to fill Moon’s role, and current Chancellor Ray Ferrero Jr., the university’s fifth president, will be become president emeritus, the university said.

Moon, who is also the COO of NSU Health, became the COO and executive vice president in 2018. He held multiple executive positions for Cleveland Clinic Florida before his career at NSU and has a lengthy background in health care.

From 1997 to 2003, Moon served as the Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Cleveland Clinic Florida. Before becoming Cleveland Clinic Florida CEO, Moon was a staff physician, a Cleveland Clinic Florida Board of Governors member and a member of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation Board of Trustees.

“Where the university is at this point in time, I think some of the skills that I bring to the table, particularly in the health care part of the enterprise, it’s very much worth doing,” Moon said Thursday night of assuming the new role.

NSU’s Vision 2025 includes raising a total of $1 billion in outside research funding and philanthropic contributions since the 2010 fiscal year, of which the university has reached 87% of that goal, the news release said. Working toward the 2025 goal, the university has also earned specialized accreditation in medicine and business programs and a partnership with HCA Florida to create a teaching hospital near the NSU Fort Lauderdale campus.

Moon said another goal is to be designated an R1 university, a classification by the Carnegie Foundation for top universities with “very high research activity.” The only private university in Florida currently with that designation is the University of Miami, while the other five are public. NSU is currently one of five universities statewide to be ranked an R2 university, meaning high research activity.

“What we can accomplish in the next period of time, I think can be very important to the university, to the community and the state,” Moon said.

Information from Sun Sentinel archives was used in this report.