Now visiting Statesboro, Dr. Carl Anthony Stockton, provost of the University of Houston-Clear Lake in Texas, is the third identified of five candidates for the job of president of Georgia Southern University invited to speak here.

Stockton is scheduled to speak and answer questions at an open forum 4 p.m. Thursday in the Carol A. Carter Recital Hall, inside the Foy Building on the GSU campus. Meanwhile, Dr. David A. Brennen, dean of the University of Kentucky College of Law, was to speak in the same location at 4 p.m. Wednesday.

Second in command at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, Stockton is senior vice-president for academic affairs, in addition to provost. The university in Houston has 8,100 students, 45 percent of whom are graduate students, according to information in Stockton's curriculum vitae, or professional history, now posted at www.georgiasouthern.edu/presidential-search. Click on "candidates."

Stockton remains active in teaching as a professor of health sciences in Houston-Clear Lake's School of Human Sciences and Humanities. Previously, he was dean and endowed chair for education at the University of Texas at Brownsville's School of Education from 2004 until 2007. Before that, he taught at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and at universities in Virginia, Alabama and Florida.

His holds a doctorate from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a master's degree and bachelor's degree from the University of Florida, all in health education.

In addition to Thursday's 4 p.m. open forum for the campus and community, Stockton is scheduled to speak to Georgia Southern faculty at an 8 a.m. Friday forum in Assembly Hall 1915 in the Nessmith-Lane Conference Center. As the visits of these two candidates overlap, Brennen is scheduled for an 8 a.m. Thursday faculty forum in the Nessmith-Lane Ballroom.

The five candidates visiting this week and next were selected by the campus-based Presidential Search and Screen Committee after interviews with eight to 12 selected applicants at the Atlanta airport. The Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia will do the hiring after the committee supplies three to five semifinalists.

The process is intended to put a new president in place by July 1 after the departure of Dr. Brooks Keel as Georgia Southern's 12th president last summer.

Georgia Southern is also posting video of the forums on the search site candidates page.