NEW YORK, Sept. 25, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- William R. Berkley, Chair of the NYU Board of
Trustees, today presided over the ceremony inaugurating
Andrew D. Hamilton as NYU's 16th president. The
ceremony, held on NYU's campus, was
attended by higher education leaders from both sides of the
Atlantic, prominent New York
political figures, and NYU students,
faculty, administrators, alumni/ae, and Trustees.
President Hamilton, a chemist and former Vice-Chancellor of
Oxford University, was selected by
NYU's Board of Trustees in March 2015 and began his presidency in
January 2016.
In his remarks, Mr. Berkley said, "In Andy Hamilton we have
found the perfect choice to solidify the gains of the last
generation and move us forward to even greater achievements.
An outstanding scholar with a strong record of achievement in
leadership posts at top universities, a laser-like focus on
academic excellence and support for faculty, a commitment to
teaching and undergraduate education, a global background and a
terrific record of fundraising – he is just the right person at
this moment in the University's history, and he 'gets' NYU."
The ceremony and the preceding week's events celebrated
NYU's remarkable academic trajectory,
and the innovation, creativity, and intellectual spirit that lie
behind NYU students' and faculty's
drive to make a difference. Hamilton's inaugural remarks
re-emphasized these ideas, and also focused on the importance of
putting academic considerations at the forefront of all
NYU does. In addition, through a
series of questions, he outlined the contours of key NYU's priorities: making investments to advance
NYU in the sciences; the emergence of
Brooklyn as hub for NYU's efforts in technology; the need for
NYU to address affordability; and the
indispensability of diversity to academic excellence, among other
issues.
President Hamilton said, "No university matches NYU for its boldness of spirit and ambition, or in
harnessing that boldness in pursuit of academic excellence. One of
the principal reasons I came to NYU was
the University's remarkable trajectory over the past several
decades, transforming itself from a largely regional school to one
of the world's foremost research universities; I knew I wanted to
be part of a University that could achieve that kind of academic
trajectory. I am deeply grateful for the welcome NYU has given me - the warmest, grandest, most
spirited, most New York welcome we
could have hoped for. We are thrilled and so proud to be part of
the NYU family."
Hamilton first joined the NYU
community in January. Actions taken since then include…:
- Holding dozens of meetings with faculty, students, and staff to
listen to campus concerns
- Selecting NYU historian
Katherine Fleming as Provost
following a nationwide search
- Setting the lowest increase in cost of attendance in 20 years,
including freezing room-and-board increases
- Establishing an Affordability Steering Committee to develop
proposals to make NYU more affordable
for students
- Creating the position of Chief Diversity Officer
- Developing programs to improve diversity in faculty hiring
- Establishing a bias response line
- Ending use of the "box" on the Common Application and
substituting a narrower question about criminal and disciplinary
history
- Expanding scholarship aid for veterans
…among other steps and initiatives.
The inauguration ceremony capped a week of student events,
student-led performances, and faculty-led talks and interactive
exhibits at Washington Square, at the 1st Avenue Health
Corridor, and in Brooklyn at
NYU's Tandon
School of Engineering that collectively showcased
NYU's academic and artistic
strengths.
The inauguration ceremony also marked the launching of the NYU
"Make a Difference" award, which recognizes members of the
NYU community whose efforts have a
profound and lasting impact on changing the world for the
better. This inaugural class of "Make a Difference" award
recipients includes:
- Olugbenga G. Ogedegbe, a
physician, Professor in NYU's School of
Medicine, and Vice Dean of NYU's
College of Global Public Health, for his health research and
outreach in the U.S. and Africa
- Diane Geng, Assistant
Dean for Academic Affairs at NYU Shanghai, and Wei Ji Ma, Professor of neural science and
psychology in NYU's Faculty of Arts and
Science, for their work in establishing the Rural China Education
Foundation
- Alumnus Scott Harrison
for founding the nonprofit "charity: water," which has provided
over 6 million with clean water
- The Mercy Project, a sentencing relief initiative
founded by the NYU School of Law's
Center on the Administration of Criminal Law and conducted by NYU
Law students
Andrew Hamilton was Vice
Chancellor of the University of Oxford
from 2009 to 2016. Prior to that, he was the Provost of
Yale University, where he was also the
Benjamin Silliman Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Molecular
Biophysics and Biochemistry; he joined the Yale faculty in 1997. He
joined the University of Pittsburgh in
1988, where was a tenured Professor of Chemistry and Chair of the
Chemistry Department. Before joining the faculty at the
University of Pittsburgh, he was an
Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Princeton
University.
His area of scholarly interest lies at the intersection of
organic and biologic chemistry, with particular focus on the use of
synthetic design for the understanding, mimicry, and potential
disruption of biological processes. He is widely published and the
recipient of numerous awards and honors (a list of his publications
can be found here). Among his many honors and awards, he is
the recipient of the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award from the American
Chemical Society, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in
2004, he was elected a member of American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, and he was the 2011 winner of the International
Izatt-Christiansen Award for Macrocyclic Chemistry.
President Hamilton received a first class BSc from the
University of Exeter, his master's
degree from the University of British
Columbia, and his doctorate from the University of Cambridge. He did postdoctoral work
at the Université Louis Pasteur.
He is married. He and his wife, Jennie, have three adult
children who all live in the United
States.
Contact: John
Beckman
212.998.6848
john.beckman@nyu.edu
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SOURCE New York University