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Ho named vice provost

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    John Ho
By SUE WUETCHER
Published: January 27, 2010

After serving in an interim capacity since 2007, John Ho has been named vice provost for graduate education and dean of the Graduate School.

The appointment was announced by Satish K. Tripathi, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs.

Ho, SUNY Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Physics, College of Arts and Sciences, was named acting vice provost in 2006 when Bruce McCombe, who held the vice provost position at the time, was named interim dean of CAS. Ho was named interim vice provost in July 2007.

“Professor Ho has done an outstanding job as interim vice provost and dean of the graduate school, and it only makes sense to formalize his appointment,” said Tripathi. “During John’s tenure as interim, he has worked tirelessly with the deans to increase the selectivity of our graduate student population and to enhance the rigor of our graduate programs.

“I am very pleased that John will continue to lead our Graduate School and I look forward to continuing our work together.”

A UB faculty member since 1975, Ho has held other administrative positions at UB, including that of dean of the former Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, chair of the Department of Statistics and associate dean for research and sponsored programs for CAS.

Ho is an experimental condensed matter physicist, with research interests in the use of light scattering, magneto-optics, electro-optics and electron diffraction to study phase transitions and critical phenomena in ferromagnets, liquid crystals, biomembranes and microemulsions.

He held faculty positions at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Houston before joining the UB faculty.

Ho also has served on various committees and panels at the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Education and the American Physical Society, and is a fellow of the APS. Among his academic honors are the DuPont Young Faculty Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Ho received a BSc in physics and mathematics from the University of Hong Kong and a PhD in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.