Colvin and Farach-Carson named to vice provost positions

FROM RICE NEWS STAFF REPORTS

Professors Vicki Colvin and Mary ”Cindy” Farach-Carson have been named to vice provost positions by Provost George McLendon.

Colvin, director of the Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology (CBEN), is vice provost for research. Farach-Carson, scientific director of the BioScience Research Collaborative (BRC), is vice provost for translational bioscience.

	VICKI COLVIN		MARY ”CINDY” FARACH-CARSON

”Vicki and Cindy are both well-respected scientists and I am delighted to have them become a critical part of Rice’s research leadership team,” McLendon said. ”Their new roles complement the recent appointment of Caroline Levander as vice provost for interdisciplinary initiatives. These three professors will provide extraordinary leadership across a broad range of intellectual activities.”

Colvin is Rice’s Kenneth S. Pitzer-Schlumberger Professor of Chemistry and professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering. She succeeds Jim Coleman, who left Rice to become dean of the College of Humanities and Sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Colvin is also faculty director of the Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology — a position she will transition out of to serve as the university’s senior research officer. Colvin will advise McLendon and take the lead on issues aimed at helping strengthen Rice’s research infrastructure and facilitating the faculty’s ability to obtain funding and conduct research.

”Federal support for science and engineering research will be at best flat for the foreseeable future,” Colvin said. ”But Rice’s small size and interdisciplinary culture make us well-positioned to compete for the increasing flow of nontraditional research support.”

As Rice’s first vice provost for translational bioscience, Farach-Carson will develop relations between the university and federal, industry and other funding agencies. And she will continue to serve as the first scientific director of the 10-story BRC, an innovative space where scientists and educators from Rice and other Texas Medical Center (TMC) institutions work together to perform leading research that benefits human medicine and health. She began that role in January.

“Since coming to Rice in 2009, I have realized that building the necessary infrastructure to rapidly bring discoveries from our laboratories at Rice to our partners in health care is a very complex challenge,” Farach-Carson said. ”It requires all of us to get out of our ‘comfort zones’ and think about new ways to work with our partners in the Texas Medical Center and in the biotechnology sector of business. With the BRC as a hub for this effort, I am delighted to focus my efforts on this goal and see what I can do to chip away at the barriers that slow translation of discovery to useful outcomes.”

Colvin joined Rice in 1996 and became director of CBEN five years later. CBEN was the first academic research center dedicated to studying the interaction of nanomaterials with living organisms and ecosystems. Under Colvin’s leadership, the center spearheaded international efforts that created consensus among industrial, regulatory, academic and nongovernmental leaders on the research agendas for safe nanotechnology. In this role, she testified before Congress twice and continues to work with the National Academy of Sciences to inform science-based regulatory policy. CBEN’s decade of funding winds down this fall, and Colvin will continue her research in this area with ongoing funding from the National Science Foundation and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Colvin’s research group has conducted groundbreaking toxicological studies on fullerenes and other nanoparticles for water purification and targeted cell death. Her use of nanorust to remove arsenic from drinking water was named one of the Top Five Nanotech Breakthroughs of 2006 by Forbes magazine and one of ”Six Ideas That Will Change the World” by Esquire, which named Colvin to its ”Best & Brightest 2007” list.

Colvin is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. She has received Phi Beta Kappa’s Teaching Prize and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and in 2002 Discover Magazine named her one of its ”Top 20 Scientists to Watch.”

She has a B.S. in chemistry and physics from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley.

Farach-Carson came to Rice from the University of Delaware, where she was the founding director of the Center for Translational Cancer Research. There she established a coordinated network that transformed clinical, educational and basic scientific efforts in translational cancer research into a cohesive effort aimed to reduce the impact of cancer on families and businesses throughout Delaware.

A professor of biochemistry and cell biology, Farach-Carson was Rice’s first associate vice provost for research, a role that focused on building collaborations between Rice and other biomedical research and education institutions in the TMC. Also a cancer researcher, Farach-Carson studies how extracellular matrix molecules function in healthy bone and contribute to bone diseases such as osteoporosis or cancer metastasis to bone. Earlier this year the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) named Farach-Carson a fellow for her “distinguished contributions to the field of bone physiology and contributions to the promotion of interdisciplinary research and science dissemination.” AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science.

A native of Galveston, Texas, Farach-Carson has a B.S. in biology from the University of South Carolina and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the Medical College of Virginia at Virginia Commonwealth University.