New faculty builds on ASU's strengths

Arizona State University is home to leading international scholars and high impact research. This year ASU has added additional energy and talent with a diverse group of scholars who bring strength to the university through the breadth of their scholarship. This new group of scholars complements ASU's already strong and internationally-recognized faculty.

For the 2005-06 academic year, more than 100 new scholars joined the faculty ranks in 15 of ASU’s 18 schools and colleges. From assistant professors to full professors and deans, the faculty gained a wide range of experience and expertise. For a biography of each of the new faculty members, please use the links in the right sidebar.

"We’ve been experiencing rapid growth, to meet the needs of our expanding student body and also to enable us to conduct high levels of research and creative activities,” says Marjorie Zatz, ASU’s vice provost. “We’re attracting extraordinary faculty — highly qualified, creative, and dedicated researchers and scholars. We are seeing this increase in our ability to recruit the very best faculty throughout the university, from the hard sciences and engineering to the humanities and the arts.”

While many of the faculty were brought to ASU for their individual expertise, many were recruited to build on ASU’s existing strengths in areas such as sustainability, border studies and bioscience.

"This has been a strategic effort to attract clusters of faculty so we can build our intellectual strength in key areas and simultaneously increase diversity,” says Zatz.

The new hires to ASU also have bolstered the university’s efforts toward faculty diversity. Of the hires in the last two years, 41 percent are female.

The new class also brings the overall proportion of minority faculty at ASU to a record 22 percent, the highest in the university’s history. ASU has a higher number of Hispanic faculty (129) than UCLA, and three times the number of American Indian faculty (26) as either UCLA or the University of Texas at Austin, both peer institutions that serve high minority populations.

ASU faculty members include 20 members of the prestigious National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Society, and one Nobel laureate. Of these, eight were hired in the last two years.

"Prospective faculty are excited by the opportunities they see here for transdisciplinary research, and for collaboration with other talented researchers and scholars,” Zatz says. “We’ve made a very determined push to increase the number of faculty and to recruit the very finest and most diverse scholars. We must meet the teaching and the research demands of the university as we grow. We also want to meet the expectations of our communities, to help find solutions to the most pressing societal demands locally, regionally, nationally and on a global scale.”

The links in the right sidebar provide biographies of each of ASU's new hires for the 2005 - 06 academic year.