Around Campus

Forty-One New Faculty Join Campus Community

Opening Convocation marked more than the arrival of the undergraduate Class of 2009 and the new graduate and medical students.

On Tuesday, Sept. 6, forty-one new professors joined the ranks of Brown's regular faculty. "Not all of them were hired into newly created faculty positions," said Rajiv Vohra, dean of the faculty. "Some of them filled standing vacancies, some took over for retiring or departing faculty. But there will be a broad effect on campus. We have made exciting hires in every area."

Brown's Plan for Academic Enrichment, approved in February 2002, set an initial goal of creating 100 additional faculty positions within eight years. This most recent hiring cycle, the third full cycle under the plan, brings the number of faculty hired into newly created positions to fifty-two. Another twenty-three new positions have been approved and allocated to departments, bringing the total number of new faculty positions filled or in search to seventy-five -- three-quarters of the way to the initial goal.

Among the new hires are senior faculty who will lead academic initiatives:

• Susan Alcock, professor of classics, will arrive in January from the University of Michigan to lead Brown's new Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World.
• Michael Steinberg, who has a joint position in history and music, is the inaugural director of the Cogut Humanities Center.
• Kenneth Wong, the inaugural Walter and Lenore Annenberg Professor for Education Policy, leads Brown's new master's program in urban education policy.

Other senior appointments include Richard Heck, professor of philosophy, from Harvard; and Glenn Loury from Boston University and Ross Levine from the University of Minnesota, both professors of economics. Huajian Gao, professor of engineering, from the Max Planck Institute; Richard Schwartz, professor of mathematics, from the University of Maryland-College Park; and Sorin Istrail, professor of computer science, will join the faculty in physical sciences. Istrail, a genomics expert from Celera Genomics, will join Brown's Center for Computational Molecular Biology.

There are three senior appointments in the Division of Biology and Medicine: Elizabeth Brainerd (ecology and evolutionary biology) from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst; Stephen Buka (community health) from the Harvard School of Public Health; and Stephen Helfand (molecular biology, cell biology and biochemistry) from the University of Connecticut Health Center.

"When you first hear that we are expanding by 100 faculty, it sounds wonderfully simple," Vohra said, "but to sustain hiring at an increased pace over time is complex. This is not just a matter of numbers; we are making a qualitative difference through this hiring process. Across campus, departments have been able to recruit their top candidates successfully."

Vohra expects recruiting cycles for the next few years to be fairly similar to this year -- perhaps forty-five or fifty searches resulting in thirty-five or forty hires. The next cycle is under way, with some departments already making decisions about advertising and recruitment.

Vohra sees that the changes at Brown are beginning to attract national notice in the academic community. "Many of the people who came to campus to interview already knew that there was a lot going on at Brown," he said. "But other places have announced plans for major faculty expansion, such as Harvard and Columbia, so we are facing significant competition from our peers."

But Vohra says there is a big difference at Brown this year: The promised growth and changes are already underway, as new research programs, centers and institutes open, leading to new labs and courses.