Northwestern officials on Thursday announced the creation of a faculty search committee to replace NU’s highest ranking minority administrator.
After consulting NU’s General Faculty Committee, University Provost Lawrence Dumas formed a search committee of seven faculty members and one administrator to find a replacement for Vice President for Research Lydia Villa-Komaroff, who plans to vacate the position Jan. 1.
Villa-Komaroff, who has held the position since 1998, will become vice president for research and chief operating officer at the Whitehead Institute, a biomedical research organization affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She also will become a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
The third Mexican-American woman in the United States to receive a doctorate in science, Villa-Komaroff established the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science in 1973 to recruit minorities in the sciences.
Before becoming vice president for research, Villa-Komaroff served as associate vice president for research for two years. Because of her promotion she has focused on building research infrastructure, which includes creating offices and ensuring compliance with regulations.
In her four years on the job, Villa-Komaroff supervised the creation of nine research centers on the Chicago and Evanston campuses.
“As vice president, my job was really to put in place incentives at those centers that would help the institution become even stronger as a research institution,” she said. “(NU is) a relatively small research university as research universities go, but we are setting the standard for the rest of the country in terms of nanotechnology and genomics.”
Villa-Komaroff is credited with increasing funds available for sponsored research at NU.
In an Oct. 10 interview, University President Henry Bienen said that during the past eight years the amount of sponsored research at NU has more than doubled.
“When I came here, we were generating about $160 million per year in sponsored research,” Bienen said. “The numbers for last year went up 17 percent … so we hit $324 million in sponsored research, and that’s remarkable.”
While at NU, Villa-Komaroff also oversaw NU’s research projects when some peer institutions suffered setbacks because of accidents involving human test subjects. She also created four institutional review boards as part of NU’s Office for the Protection of Research Subjects.
Villa-Komaroff, who announced her decision to leave her post Sept. 26, said she has decided to move to the Boston area because she and her husband, who works in Boston, have been traveling between Boston and Chicago for seven years.
Another enticing aspect to the job change is that the Whitehead Institute was founded by her graduate thesis adviser, David Baltimore, who now serves as president of the California Institute of Technology and is a Nobel laureate.
“(Whitehead) is an institution that I feel very fond of and I am delighted at the opportunity to go and make it strong,” she said. “I’ve reached the point in my career where I’d like to do more academic work in addition to the administrative work that I do.”
At Sloan, Villa-Komaroff said she will teach classes that examine academic research in higher education.
In seeking a new vice president for research, chemistry Prof. Frederick Lewis, chairman of the search committee, said candidates will come from both within and outside NU. In recent years, several high-level posts, such as the Kellogg dean and NU’s vice president for student affairs, have been filled by a candidate within NU’s ranks.
“The person is basically responsible for all issues relating to the conduct of research on the Evanston campus and the Chicago campus,” Lewis said. “The number of people who are qualified to do this job are quite small … (but) it is a crucial job for the university.”
Lewis said the committee wants to find someone to replace Villa-Komaroff before next summer.
