September 12, 2024
Dear Members of Our Campus Community,
I am writing to share with you that, after more than eight years of extraordinary leadership and service to our campus community, Vice Chancellor for Research Joe Incandela has decided to return to his faculty position by the end of this calendar year.
Dr. Incandela has provided visionary leadership for our Office of Research, working closely with our colleagues across the campus to advance our research mission and achieve our research funding goals. With tremendous dedication and perseverance, he helped our academic community navigate the challenges of the pandemic and our subsequent research ramp-up.
During Dr. Incandela’s tenure, our University’s annual extramural research funding has increased remarkably, from $184 million in 2016 to $267.2 million in 2024. This has been accompanied by an even larger percentage increase in governmental compliance and policy requirements related to research funding. To address the numerous challenges created by these new requirements and the expansion of our research portfolio, Dr. Incandela has supported the modernization and streamlining of many tools and processes by Office of Research staff, who also now play an important role in our campus’s preparations for a new financial system.
Dr. Incandela holds our inaugural Joe and Pat Yzurdiaga Chair in Experimental Science. He has been a member of our Physics faculty since 2000, after spending a decade at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL). His research is primarily focused on the search for new fundamental particles at high-energy colliders. He is currently a member of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and the Light Dark Matter eXperiment (LDMX), which is being proposed for operation at Stanford’s Accelerator Complex (SLAC).
Dr. Incandela was a leading contributor to the discovery of the top quark in 1995 while a scientist at FNAL, and was the leader of the CMS experiment at the time of the discovery of the Higgs boson. He is a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Among many honors and distinctions, he was awarded the 2013 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.
In January 2025, Dr. Incandela plans to take a sabbatical leave to focus on his research, which includes responsibility for part of the project to replace much of the CMS experimental apparatus.
We will consult with our Academic Senate, executive vice chancellor, academic deans, faculty, staff, and administrative colleagues to form a search advisory committee for this important position, and to conduct a national search.
Please join me in congratulating and thanking Joe for his exceptional contributions as vice chancellor, and his continuing contributions as our faculty colleague.
Sincerely,
Henry T. Yang
Chancellor