Your daily dose of news, notes and links from around Kansas University.

• I spotted another candidate for KU’s newly-created vice chancellor for public affairs position. Timothy C. Caboni will visit KU on Friday. He’s associate dean for external relations and professional education and associate professor of the practice of public policy and higher education at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College. You can see his complete credentials (including some teacher evaluation scores!) here.

He has an open question-and-answer session scheduled from 1:30 to 2 p.m. in the Provost conference room, 250 Strong Hall.

I was beginning to wonder why he followed me on Twitter back on Dec. 27. (You can too @LJW_KU.) He’s @caboni, by the way. I guess I just thought he might be wanting to keep tabs on the special education program nipping at his heels. KU’s excellent graduate program in special education is second only to Vanderbilt’s in the latest U.S. News rankings.

If only I could have connected the dots a little quicker…

Another candidate, Dara L. Troutman, who works as the chief of staff to the president of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, visited campus last week.

• With all the chatter about cutting state employees’ pay, I got an e-mail late Tuesday night asking about the highest-paid non-athletics employee at KU.

I’m not sure about that, but I have a pretty good guess. Going by salary alone, the highest-paid employee is not Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little, who takes home $425,000 annually. Though, I will say, it’s hard to beat her benefits — anyone else out there get a free house as part of your job?

The highest-paid KU employee I’m aware of is Barbara Atkinson, executive vice chancellor of KU Medical Center and dean of the KU School of Medicine. Her total compensation was $534,876 in 2010. The state, however, doesn’t pay for that entire bill. Atkinson also gets part of her salary from private funds and grants.

• The KU Cancer Center announced another hire recently. Danny Welch has joined the cancer center as associate director of basic science.

The Kansas Bioscience Authority contributed $1.6 million for Welch’s recruitment.

Welch comes to KU from the University of Alabama-Birmingham, where he was director of the National Foundation for Cancer Research Center for Cancer Metastasis Research, and his research focuses on how tumors metastasize.

The cancer center depends on these recruits to bolster its National Cancer Institute funding, which is a key metric in determining whether the cancer center will receive NCI designation after it applies in September.

Welch began been working on a part-time basis earlier this month, and will become full-time on April 1.

• Even candidates for high-profile positions know about the high-quality information you can find here at Heard on the Hill. Help me continue churning out good information by giving me a tip at ahyland@ljworld.com.