IOWA CITY - Purdue Provost Sally Mason Named University Of Iowa's 20th President

The Board of Regents, State of Iowa, Thursday named Purdue University Provost Sally Mason, 57, the University of Iowa's 20th president. The appointment takes effect Aug. 1. Her salary was set at $450,000.

Mason will succeed David Skorton, who left the UI in June 2006 to become president of Cornell University in New York. Gary Fethke, retired dean of the UI Henry B. Tippie College of Business, has been serving as interim UI president since Skorton's departure and will remain in that role until Mason moves into 101 Jessup Hall later this summer.

Thursday's announcement took place in the Iowa Memorial Union, with members of the Board of Regents, members of the UI community and other well-wishers in attendance. Photos from the announcement, Mason's vita and other information is available at http://www.uiowa.edu/uipresidentialsearch/welcome/, which will be updated throughout the coming days.

As UI president, Mason will lead the largest of three Iowa Regents' universities and home to the world-renowned Iowa Writers' Workshop, one of America's best hospitals and the Iowa Hawkeyes athletic teams. Founded in 1847 as the state's first public institution of higher learning and located on a 1,900-acre campus, the UI today is a comprehensive public university committed to high-quality teaching, research, and service.

The UI currently enrolls close to 30,000 students and several UI programs rank among the nation's best. Its faculty includes three Pulitzer Prize winners, four former clerks to U.S. Supreme Court justices, two National Medal of Science winners, and four Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators.

During her tenure at Purdue, Mason invested both professionally and personally in diversity and innovative research and education.

She raised funds for and implemented a number of major diversity initiatives at Purdue, including creation of a Native American education and cultural center and a Latino Cultural Center, joining a black cultural center already on campus. She started two programs funded by the National Science Foundation that work to increase retention and graduation rates among students in science fields, especially minorities. And she recently implemented a new initiative that focuses on recruitment, including more minority faculty appointments, professional development programs, and incentives for teaching and research on diversity.

In 2004, Mason and her husband, Kenneth, gave a $2 million gift to create the Sally K. and Kenneth A. Mason Fund in support of Purdue's Discovery Learning Center (DLC). The DLC, one of 10 interdisciplinary research centers in Purdue's new Discovery Park, was created to advance research that revolutionizes learning in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and math). Through externally funded research projects, innovative programs, and collaborative partnerships, the DLC is seeks to redesign educational practices and create innovative learning environments that, according to the DLC's Web site, "have immediate impact and nurture lifelong learning for students and citizens of a global community."

In April 2005, Mason announced that the Indiana Commission for Higher Education approved Purdue's plan to become the first university to offer graduate degrees in engineering education. The move came on the heels of Purdue's creation of a Department of Engineering Education in 2004.

And in February 2006, President George W. Bush appointed Mason to be one of 14 members of the President's Committee on the National Medal of Sciences. The committee reviews nominations made by members of the National Academy of Science, academia and the general public and makes recommendations to the president annually.

A native of New York City, Mason received her bachelor's degree in zoology from the University of Kentucky in 1972, a master's degree from Purdue University in 1974, and a Ph.D. in cellular, molecular, and developmental biology from the University of Arizona in 1978. After two years at Indiana University in Bloomington doing postdoctoral research, she joined the University of Kansas in 1981. During the span of her 21 years at KU, she served as a full professor in the Department of Molecular Biosciences, acting chair of the Department of Physiology and Cell Biology, associate dean in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and finally, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

In 2001, Mason returned to Purdue, where she is currently a professor of biology and provost of the University. Her responsibilities there include oversight for all of the academic programs on the West Lafayette campus and those on the four Purdue-affiliated regional campuses. She has received a number of teaching awards, including a Mortar Board Outstanding Educator Award, an Outstanding Academic Advisor Award, and a prestigious Kemper Teaching Fellowship.
Mason is the author of many scientific papers and has obtained a number of research grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Wesley Research Foundation. More recently, she has served as principal investigator for several large statewide NSF grants and grants from the Lilly Endowment in Indiana.

Among the many national and international organizations of which she has been a part, Mason has served as president of the Pan American Society for Pigment Cell Research, president of the Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences, member of the Advisory Committee to the NSF Directorate for Education and Human Resources (EHR), member of the NSF Advisory Committee for GPRA Performance Assessment, member of the executive board of the NASULGC Chief Academic Officers Group, and chair of the board of Inproteo, a start-up company collaboration between Eli Lilly, Inc., Indiana University, and Purdue University.

The search for the UI president was chaired by UI College of Dentistry Dean David Johnsen. The other search committee members of the UI Presidential Search Committee included Professor Jonathan Carlson, College of Law; Professor Lee Anna Clark, Department of Psychology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS); Professor Elizabeth Chrischilles, Department of Epidemiology, College of Public Health; Associate Professor Sarah England, Physiology and Biophysics, Carver College of Medicine (CCOM); Professor Ed Folsom, Department of English, CLAS; Leonard Hadley, retired Chairman and CEO, Maytag Corporation; Dean Linda Maxson, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; Professor Paul Rothman, DEO, Department of Internal Medicine, CCOM; Professor Gene Parkin, Department of Civil-Environmental Engineering, College of Engineering; Cheryl Reardon, Assistant to the Dean/VP for Research; Professor Jarjisu Sa-Aadu, Department of Finance, Tippie College of Business; and Sarah Vigmostad, graduate student in the Department of Biomedical Engineering.