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Posted 06/19/02
Michael S. Gazzaniga, a renowned scholar and pioneer in the field of cognitive neuroscience, will be the new Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Dartmouth College, it has been announced by Dartmouth President James Wright. Currently the David T. McLaughlin Distinguished Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth, Gazzaniga is internationally acclaimed for his groundbreaking work in the science of the brain.
"The search committee offered its unanimous and enthusiastic support of Dr. Gazzaniga," President Wright said. "I am delighted that he has agreed to be the next Dean of the Faculty at Dartmouth, and I look forward to working with him in this important post."
"Dartmouth College and its faculty represent a great force for teaching, research and scholarship," said Gazzaniga. "I am honored to have this opportunity and eager to work with my colleagues in this new role. Working with President Wright to broaden and deepen Dartmouth's renowned faculty resources will be a priority in the coming years."
Gazzaniga will succeed Jamshed Bharucha, Dartmouth's John Wentworth Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, who recently announced his intent to accept the position of Provost of Tufts University.
As Dean of the Faculty, Gazzaniga will oversee the Humanities, the Sciences, the Social Sciences, and the interdisciplinary Programs and Graduate Studies. These divisions comprise some 40 academic departments and programs with over 580 faculty members. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences is one of the four faculties at Dartmouth, the others being in the Dartmouth Medical School, the Thayer School of Engineering and the Tuck School of Business Administration.
Gazzaniga will take office as Dean on September 1, 2002. Carol Folt, Professor of Biology and Associate Dean of the Faculty and Dean of Graduate Studies, will serve as Acting Dean of the Faculty from July 1 until that time.
A 1961 graduate of Dartmouth, Gazzaniga pursued graduate studies with Caltech psychobiologist John Sperry, who won a Nobel Prize in 1981. There he became involved in the study of "split brain" processes and received his Ph.D. from Caltech in 1964. He was a post-graduate Fellow at Caltech from 1964 to 1966, and spent part of 1966 in Pisa, Italy on a National Institute of Health Fellowship. Before returning to Dartmouth in 1996, Professor Gazzaniga headed the Center for Neuroscience and was a Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California at Davis. He has also held positions at Cornell University Medical College, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, New York University Graduate School, and the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Recently appointed by President George Bush to his national Council on Bioethics, Gazzaniga is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Psychological Association, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the American Neurological Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has been the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, a Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award, and the C.U. Ariens Kappers Medal for Neuroscience of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Science, among others. He is the author of more than 200 scholarly publications, and the author, coauthor or editor of more than 15 books.
At Dartmouth he developed a new cognitive neuroscience program that brings scholars from fields such as Computer Science, Neurology, Neuropsychiatry and several others together to conduct research and work with undergraduate and graduate students. The Center also houses the national functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Data Center, a publicly-accessible repository of peer-reviewed fMRI studies and their underlying data
Gazzaniga is widely acknowledged to be the founder of the field of Cognitive Neuroscience and is the President of the Cognitive Neuroscience Institute and the founder of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society at Dartmouth. In 1989 he founded the country's first cognitive neuroscience degree-granting program at the Dartmouth Medical School. He is also the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, the associate editor of Cerebral Cortex, and the editor of Monographs in Cognitive Neuroscience.
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