From staff reports

UNC-Chapel Hill Provost Bruce Carney is returning to teaching and research at the end of the academic year after serving as the university’s chief academic officer since 2009, Chancellor Holden Thorp announced Thursday.

Carney, a distinguished professor of physics and astronomy, had been pressed into service as provost by Thorp after Bernadette Gray-Little was hired to be chancellor at the University of Kansas. Carney started out as the interim provost, but the title became permanent when a search for a successor failed.

“For the past three years, he has admirably steered the University's academic operations through an extremely difficult economic period in which we have maintained our standing as a top public university and continued to offer students an outstanding education in the face of unprecedented budget cuts,” Thorp said in a statement.

Thorp has asked Kristen Swanson, dean of the School of Nursing and Alumni Distinguished Professor, to lead the search committee for a new provost.

Carney has been at UNC-CH since 1980.