Stephanie Graham, the new general counsel at Northwestern University.

Stephanie Graham, the new general counsel at Northwestern University, sees her post not as a job but as a calling at the school she has served for 26 years.

Northwestern president Morton Schapiro on Tuesday named Graham, who was serving as interim GC during a national search, to the post of vice president and general counsel, effective as of June 17.

“Stephanie Graham has everything that a major research university would want in a general counsel,” Schapiro said in a statement. “She has a deep and broad understanding of the higher education landscape, a firm grasp of the complex legal and ethical issues that universities face in this era, and the highest level of personal and professional integrity.”

He also said Graham carries “a profound knowledge of, and love for, the Northwestern academic community that comes from 26 years of dedicated service here.”

Graham said, “Being a part of the Northwestern community is not just a job for me. It is a true calling and makes the work I do deeply meaningful.”

She said she views the Evanston, Illinois-based university “as a complex client who needs superb support to advance and protect the work it does. I look forward, especially, to stepping into this new role and leading the team of attorneys that I helped build and mentor during my time here.”

For example, Graham said one of the exciting issues she deals with is supporting Northwestern's researchers. “We have cutting edge research going on, and that's a fast-paced and ever evolving world. There's drug development, device development, and spinoff companies that require our legal support,” she explained, including intellectual property and conflict of interest issues.

Another hot issue, Graham said, that all research universities are dealing with is how to handle students from China. “We have our own policies about fairness and national origin and such,” she said, “but the federal government now has recently escalated concerns about wanting to make sure data is safe, especially where they are funding research. Universities are starting to get into 'export control,' and the export is information.”

The U.S. government has warned that foreign governments, especially China, are recruiting students and visiting scholars at universities to copy intellectual property data from confidential grant applications, enabling scientists to set up “shadow laboratories” in the foreign countries.

The university said Graham has extensive experience on a broad range of legal issues affecting higher education. She has managed complex litigation “such as several high-profile cases with multiple defendants and multimillion-dollar contractual issues,” the school added.

Graham joined the university in 1993 as assistant general counsel and moved up through the ranks to associate vice president and deputy general counsel in 2017. Last November she was named interim general counsel when then-GC Philip Harris left abruptly.

Graham began her career as a labor and employment litigation associate for three years with Chicago law firm Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, which is now part of Dentons.

An honors graduate from the University of Chicago Law School, she also has served as an adjunct instructor during much of her time at Northwestern.