NEW: Brown U. Hires New Provost

NEW: Brown U. Hires New Provost

Mark S. Schlissel, M.D., Ph. D. will succeed David I. Kertzer as the 11th provost of Brown University, President Ruth Simmons announced yesterday.

Schlissel, currently the dean of biological sciences in the College of Letters and Science at the University of California- Berkeley, will assume his duties as Brown’s chief academic officer effective July 1, 2011.

“I’m grateful for the opportunity to work with President Simmons and the entire Brown community,” Schlissel said. “I can’t imagine a more exciting academic leadership position and I am anxious to get started.”

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As provost, Schlissel will serve as deputy to President Simmons. Many of the University’s senior positions – including the deans of the Undergraduate College, Graduate School, and faculty – report directly to the provost. Schlissel was recommended by a 12-member search committee chaired by President Simmons after a five-month international search for Kertzer’s successor. Kertzer has served the position for the past five years.

“The appointment of a provost… is of vital interest to the entire faculty,” said Cynthia Garcia Coll, professor of education and chair of Brown’s Faculty Executive Committee, who was invited to interview Schlissel as part of the search process. “The search committee of faculty members and student representatives was deliberate and thorough.”

Why he came to Brown

Schlissel is a graduate of Princeton University (B.A., summa cum laude, 1979, biochemical sciences), earned his M.D. and Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (1986, physiological chemistry), did his residency training in internal medicine at Hopkins Hospital and conducted postdoctoral research as a Bristol-Myers cancer research fellow at MIT’s Whitehead Institute. He began an independent research career at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1991 – where he won a number of prestigious awards and fellowships – and then moved to UC-Berkeley’s Department of Molecular and Cell Biology as an associate professor in 1999. He advanced to full professor in 2002.

Schlissel has also served as chair of the department’s graduate admission committee since 2001, vice chair of the department from 2002-2007, and dean of biological sciences since July 2008. He was a member of the Immunobiology Study Section at the National Institutes of Health from 2002-2004 and served as chair from 2004-2006. He is currently a member of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Scientific Review Board, the American Society of Clinical Investigators (to which he was elected in 1998) and the American Association of Immunologists (since 1992). His research has focused on developmental immunobiology and he is the author or co-author of almost 100 scientific papers.

“Mark Schlissel comes to brown with a record of significant accomplishments,” President Simmons said. “He is above all an excellent and highly rated scholar and teacher.”

“I was attracted to Brown because of its unique and widely admired undergraduate educational program and by its commitment not to rest on it laurels but to aspire to even greater impact on our society,” Schlissel said. “By funding need-blind admissions, increasing the size of the faculty, and investing in teaching and research infrastructure, Brown has assembled a platform for fantastic achievements in the years ahead.”

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