Rodney Erickson became Executive Vice President and Provost of Penn State in July 1999. He holds B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Minnesota, and was awarded a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Washington in 1973.

He began his academic career at the University of Wisconsin—Madison before joining the faculty at Penn State in 1977. He was promoted to the rank of professor in both geography and business administration in 1984, and was named Dean of the Graduate School in 1995. He took on the additional responsibilities of Vice President for Research in 1997.

Dr. Erickson’s current responsibilities include leadership and administration for academic affairs and University operations for all undergraduate and graduate/professional education, research, and outreach educational programs; enrollment management; information technology services; educational equity; strategic planning, budgeting, and quality initiatives; facilities and space planning; and participation in University development, alumni relations, and legislative affairs. His responsibilities span all 24 Penn State campuses.

Thomas Rosenbaum became Provost of the University of Chicago in January 2007. He received his bachelor’s degree in physics with honors from Harvard University. He then attended Princeton University, where he earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. in physics.

Dr. Rosenbaum is the John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor in Physics at the University. He conducted research at Bell Laboratories and at IBM Watson Research Center before he joined the Chicago faculty in 1983. He directed the University’s Materials Research Laboratory from 1991 to 1994, and the University’s James Franck Institute from 1995 to 2001. Dr. Rosenbaum currently chairs the multi-institutional Science Policy Council of Argonne.

As provost, Dr. Rosenbaum is responsible for academic appointments, programs and budgetary priorities at the University, which has a faculty of 2,160 faculty members and a student enrollment of 12,500.

Dr. Rosenbaum’s honors include an Alfred Sloan Research Fellowship, a Presidential Young Investigator Award and the William McMillan Award for Outstanding Contributions to Condensed Matter Physics. He is an elected fellow and Centennial Lecturer of the American Physical Society and an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

R. Michael Tanner joined UIC as Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs in July 2002 after a 30-year long career at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He holds bachelors, masters and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

Dr. Tanner served as chair of the department of computer and information sciences at UC Santa Cruz from 1981 to 1988. Following a year as acting dean of natural sciences, he was appointed academic vice chancellor, overseeing academic components of the campus, including academic planning and new program review. In 1992, he was promoted to executive vice chancellor, a post he held for five years. His additional responsibilities included fiscal planning, managing a $225 million budget, new construction planning, and computer and resource planning and policy.

In 2000, Dr. Tanner was named interim director for the University of California Silicon Valley Center, where he was responsible for developing a satellite campus for 2,000 students at the NASA Research Park in the NASA Ames Research Center in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Dr. Tanner’s research interests include coding and information theory, computer simulation models, educational uses of information technology, and intellectual property. He holds four patents and is a fellow of the California Council on Science and Technology and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. In public service, he was a member of the board of directors of the United Way, Santa Cruz County, from 1993 to 1998, and served as a member of the board of trustees of York School, Monterey, CA, from 1994 to 2002.

Linda Katehi became Provost of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in April 2006. She received a B.S.E.E. degree from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, in 1977 and M.S.E.E. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1981 and 1984 respectively.

In September 1984, she joined the faculty of the EECS Department of the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor as an assistant professor and moved to the levels of associate professor in 1989 and professor in 1994. She served in administrative positions including Director of Graduate programs in the College of Engineering in 1995-1996, elected member of the College Executive Committee 1996-1998, Associate Dean for Graduate Education, 1998-1999 and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs 1999-2001. In January 2002, Dr. Katehi joined Purdue University as the John A. Edwardson Dean of Engineering and as Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

She is a Fellow of IEEE, and a member of IEEE AP-S, MTT-S, Sigma XI, Hybrid Microelectronics, URSI Commission D. She was a member of AP-S ADCOM from 1992 to 1995 and she is serving currently on the IEEE MTT-S ADCOM. Also, Dr. Katehi has been an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions of the Microwave Theory and Techniques Society and the IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation. She has been the author or co-author of 450 papers published in referred journals and symposia proceedings and she holds 5 patents.

Karen Hanson became Provost and Executive Vice President of Indiana University in August 2007. She received a B.A. degree in philosophy and mathematics from the University of Minnesota in 1970 and Ph.D. and A.M. degrees in philosophy from Harvard in 1980.

Dr. Hanson has taught at Indiana University-Bloomington since 1976 in the Department of Philosophy, serving as department chair from 1997 to 2002 and Rudy Professor since 2001. In 2002, she was named Dean of the Hutton Honors College. She also is an adjunct professor of gender studies, American studies and comparative literature.

Dr. Hanson's principal research interests are in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, ethics, aesthetics and American philosophy. She has published many articles and essays in these areas and is the author of The Self Imagined: Philosophical Reflections on the Social Character of Psyche (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986) and a co-editor of Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory (Indiana University Press, 1990).

She has served on the Executive Committee of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, as chair of the Board of Officers of the APA, and APA delegate to the American Council of Learned Societies. She also has been an associate editor of Journal of Social Philosophy, a member of the editorial board of American Philosophical Quarterly and a trustee for the American Society for Aesthetics.

Wallace D. Loh was appointed Executive Vice President and Provost at the University of Iowa on August 1, 2008. He holds a B.A. from Grinnell College, an M.A. from Cornell University and received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in 1971 and his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1974.

His previous administrative positions include Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, Seattle University (1999-2008); Director of the Governor’s Executive Policy Office for the State of Washington (1997-99), Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculties, University of Colorado at Boulder (1995-97) and Dean of the University of Washington Law School (1990-95). He has served as Professor at the University of Washington, Cornell University, University of Colorado at Boulder, University of Texas at Austin, Vanderbilt University, Emory University, University of Houston, and Beijing University (China). Prior to his academic appointments, he worked in corporate law firms in New York and San Francisco, and was a researcher at the American Bar Foundation (Chicago).

His teaching areas include contract law, constitutional criminal procedure, criminal law, and law and social science. He is the author of Social Research in the Judicial Process, over 30 articles in law journals and social science journals, and numerous op-ed articles. Federal and foundation grants to support his research have totaled over $750,000.

In 1996, he was elected President of the Association of American Law Schools, the learned society of the academic legal profession. In 1990, he was elected Outstanding Professor of the Year by the students of the University of Washington. He received an honorary Doctor of Laws from Grinnell College and the “Trailblazer Award” from the National Asian and Pacific-American Bar Association. He has served on various community boards, including Vice President of the Board of the Seattle Public Library.

Teresa A. Sullivan became Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at University of Michigan in June 2006. She earned a bachelor’s degree from James Madison College of Michigan State University in 1970 and she received her Ph.D. in 1975 from The University of Chicago.

She was member of the faculty at The University of Texas since 1981 and served as Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at The University of Texas System, holding appointments as Professor of Sociology and Professor and Cox & Smith, Inc., Law Faculty Fellow at The University of Texas at Austin.

A labor force demographer, she writes on issues of economic marginality. She received the 1990 Silver Gavel Award of the American Bar Association for her co-authored study of consumer bankruptcy, As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America (Oxford, 1990). She is the co-author of the leading textbook on the sociology of work, The Social Organization of Work (third edition, Wadsworth, 2002).

Dr. Sullivan is past president of the Association of Graduate Schools, the Conference of Southern Graduate Schools, and the Association of Texas Graduate Schools. She is a former member of the GRE Board, past Secretary of the American Sociological Association, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, for which she is past Chair of the Section on Social, Economic, and Political Science, and past Chair of the U.S. Census Advisory Committee. Following the 1990 and 2000 censuses, she served on advisory boards to the Secretary of Commerce on the accuracy of the census count.

Kim A. Wilcox became Michigan State University’s Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs in August 2005. He received his bachelor’s degree in audiology and speech sciences from Michigan State University (1976) and his master’s and doctorate from Purdue University (1978 and 1980), both in speech and hearing science.

He came to MSU from the University of Kansas, where he served as Dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences and a vice provost for general education coordination from 2002 to 2005. Prior to his MSU appointments, he served for three years as President and CEO of the Kansas Board of Regents. He spent one year as Interim Director of Academic Affairs for the Board of Regents before being appointed President and CEO.

Dr. Wilcox began his career on the faculty at the University of Missouri. He then spent 14 years on the faculty of the University of Kansas, including 10 as the chair of the department of speech-language-hearing. In addition to previous service as special counsel to the chancellor at the University of Kansas, Wilcox is a past University of Kansas Vice Chancellor Fellow and a fellow of the American Council on Education. In 1991 he initiated the Native American training program in speech-language pathology in collaboration with Haskell Indian Nations University. He has published extensively in the area of developmental speech acoustics, is the recipient of several teaching awards, and has directed teaching, research, and service projects funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education.

E. Thomas Sullivan became Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost in July 2004. He graduated from law school at Indiana University in 1973 and began his career in higher education as a faculty member at the University of Missouri, Columbia.

Dr. Sullivan served as the eighth dean of the University of Minnesota Law School from 1995 to 2002. Upon finishing his term as dean, he returned to full-time research and teaching and was named the Irving Younger Professor of Law and in 2005 was named the Julius E. Davis Chair in Law. His teaching areas include antitrust, civil procedure, complex litigation, and regulation of business. He is a nationally recognized authority on antitrust law and complex litigation, having authored eight books and over 40 articles.

He has been a visiting faculty member at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C. and a visiting scholar at Cambridge University in England. During the Fall semester 2002, he was a visiting professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley.

Before coming to the University of Minnesota, Dr. Sullivan served for six years as Dean of the University of Arizona College of Law and as Associate Dean at Washington University in St. Louis.

Daniel I. Linzer became Provost of Northwestern University in September 2007. Prior to coming to Northwestern, Linzer received his bachelor of science degree in molecular biophysics and biochemistry from Yale University in 1976 and a Ph.D. in biochemical sciences from Princeton University in 1980. He completed a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellowship at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Linzer joined Northwestern in 1984 as an assistant professor, and is now a professor of biochemistry, molecular biology and cell biology. He has conducted pioneering research on the molecular basis of hormone action. Following four years as Associate Dean, Linzer was appointed Dean of Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences in 2002.

Among the many awards he has received are the Searle Scholars Award, the American Cancer Society Faculty Research Award, and the Northwestern Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Award.

Joseph A. Alutto became Executive Vice President and Provost of The Ohio State University in July 2007. He received his bachelor's degree in business administration from Manhattan College, a master's degree in industrial relations from the University of Illinois, and a Ph.D. in organizational behavior from Cornell University.

Before joining Ohio State, Dr. Alutto was the Clarence S. Marsh Professor of Management at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He also served as Dean of the SUNY-Buffalo School of Management from 1976 to 1990. Dr. Alutto was appointed Dean of the Max M. Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University in 1991, holding the John W. Berry Sr. Chair in Business. He is a professor of management and human resources. Dr. Alutto also served as Executive Dean for the Professional Colleges, where he coordinated the activities of the Colleges of Education and Human Ecology, Engineering, Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Law and Social Work.

Dr. Alutto is a leading authority on managerial behavior, having published on research methods in organizations and more than 65 articles in academic journals. His research expertise also includes joint ventures, corporate and individual performance, management education and Sino-U.S. economic activity. He has lectured widely in Asia on management issues, and in 1984 pioneered the first Sino-U.S. jointly funded MBA program offered in the People's Republic of China. He is a member of the Academy of Management, American Psychological Association, Labor and Employment Relations Association and American Association for the Advancement of Science. He served as President of the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business—the International Association for Management Education from October 1996 - June 1998.

Randy Woodson was appointed Provost of Purdue University on May 1, 2008. Dr. Woodson’s responsibilities include oversight for all academic programs on the West Lafayette campus and on the four Purdue-affiliated regional campuses. He received his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees in horticulture from the University of Arkansas and Cornell University, respectively. He joined the Purdue faculty in 1985 as a professor in the Department of Horticulture after beginning his academic career at Louisiana State University in 1983.

Dr. Woodson was the Associate Dean of Agriculture and Director of the Office of Agricultural Research Programs at Purdue from July 1998 to November 2004. Prior to his administrative appointments, Dr. Woodson served as Head of the Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture at Purdue and was a Visiting Scholar at the École Nationale Supérieure Agronomique de Toulouse, France. In November 2004, Dr. Woodson was appointed Dean of Agriculture at Purdue. As dean, he was responsible for overseeing the College of Agriculture, the State Chemist’s Office, the Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory, and other regulatory functions assigned by the state to Purdue University.

Dr. Woodson has received a number of professional honors during his career, including the Purdue University Agriculture Research Award, the American Society for Horticultural Science Outstanding Researcher Career Award, and the B.Y. Morrison Medal from the USDA-Agricultural Research Service. He is a fellow of the American Society for Horticultural Science.

Patrick Farrell was appointed Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in April 2006. He earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Michigan, his master’s degree at the University of California at Berkeley, and his doctorate at the University of Michigan, all in mechanical engineering.

Dr. Farrell has been at University of Wisconsin-Madison since 1982 as a member of the mechanical engineering faculty. He served as director of the Engine Research Center from 1999-2001, and beginning in 2001, became the College of Engineering associate dean for academic affairs. He was named executive associate dean in 2005.

Dr. Farrell’s research focuses on fluid mechanics, combustion and optical methods as they relate to engine design and function. He was part of the original team that developed an innovative hands-on design course for freshman engineers, and is a fellow of the UW-Madison Teaching Academy.