Brown has just announced that CS's Andy van Dam has been named Vice President for Research. This is a new position at Brown, and we're heartened and extremely pleased that Andy'll be the one to start it off. We're even more pleased that, in spite of this new position, Andy will continue to teach his accustomed CS courses and to be the presence in the CS department that he has always been.
An excerpt from the Provost's announcement of Andy's appointment follows.
Improving the University's research infrastructure is critical at a time when Brown is making significant investments in its academic programs. The University needs a creative leader not only to help us develop large-scale multidisciplinary projects but also to enhance our research profile in a number of ways across all departments and programs. I am delighted that Andy van Dam will focus his considerable energy and talents in these areas during the coming years as Vice President for Research. In this position, Andy will have senior responsibility for all aspects of research at Brown. He will work closely with faculty and the academic administration to foster internal and external academic centers, groupings and relationships which will enhance and extend the University's research efforts. He will oversee the University's intellectual property policies, its efforts to identify transferable intellectual property, and its Office of Research Administration. He will also be an advocate for the University's research community on and off campus.
Professor van Dam earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania - the second computer science Ph.D. ever conferred in the United States - and came to Brown in 1965 as an assistant professor of applied mathematics. He became the chair of Brown's Program in Computer Science in 1976 and was the founding chair when the program achieved departmental status in 1979. In a research career spanning more than three decades, he has worked on computer graphics, text processing and hypermedia systems, including systems for creating and reading electronic books with interactive illustrations. Van Dam is the author or co-author of several standard texts in the computer graphics field and has written or co-written more than 90 papers in professional journals. He lectures and consults internationally and has been widely honored for his work. He has been involved with a number of startups and is currently on the technical advisory boards of ContextMedia (Providence) and Microsoft Research (Washington).
