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News

Cartwright to head Center of Excellence

  • Alexander Cartwright

By ELLEN GOLDBAUM
Published: September 24, 2010

Alexander N. Cartwright, interim vice president for research, has been named acting executive director of UB’s New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, Provost Satish K. Tripathi has announced.

Cartwright will hold the two positions simultaneously, Tripathi explained, a reflection of the increasingly transdisciplinary nature of the Center of Excellence. He said the center now will report to the vice president for research. The center had been reporting to the Office of the Provost.

“Since its establishment, the center’s research productivity and impact has grown, contributing to our nation’s research and our region’s life sciences sector,” Tripathi said, noting that those contributions have resulted largely from the robust involvement of faculty researchers engaged with one another across the university’s life sciences, engineering and natural sciences disciplines.

“During its ten-year history, it has become increasingly clear to me that the center and its faculty would be best served by an organizational structure that is representative of the entire university research enterprise,” Tripathi said.

He thanked David Dunn, vice president for health sciences, for graciously providing leadership to the Center of Excellence on an interim basis over the past couple of years.

Tripathi pointed out that Cartwright’s leadership skills, particularly his ability to integrate multiple disciplinary perspectives, would be especially appropriate in his new post at the Center of Excellence.

“Cartwright’s collaborative leadership style, his vision of research excellence and his knowledge of the university’s research enterprise will provide the Center of Excellence with exceptional leadership as it enters its second decade,” he said.

Cartwright has been serving as interim vice president for research since July 1 when Jorge Jose left UB to become system vice president for research at Indiana University.

Over the past two years, Cartwright has been instrumental in establishing UB's new focus on biomedical engineering, a joint effort between the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. He previously served as chair of the departments of Electrical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering, as well as vice provost for strategic initiatives, functioning as the point person in the Office of the Provost for the UB 2020 strategic strengths initiative. He also helped build the research infrastructure and foster collaboration across the multiple strategic strengths of the UB 2020 plan.