February 26, 2007

To the Campus Community

Dear Colleagues:

After six and a half years of outstanding leadership of our Division of Mathematical, Life, and Physical Sciences, Dean Martin Moskovits has decided to pursue an opportunity in the private sector. He will be taking a leave of absence beginning May 1, 2007, in order to become the Chief Technology Officer for API Electronics, a semiconductor company in New York. Dean Moskovits currently holds a faculty position in our Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and plans to return to our campus as a full-time professor following this leave of absence.

We are honored to have this opportunity to thank Dean Moskovits for his many extraordinary contributions to our campus over the years. His tenure as dean has been characterized by a strong commitment to excellence and innovation that has enhanced our programs, raised our international visibility, and steadily advanced our academic reputation and prestige. Some noteworthy accomplishments during the past six and a half years of Dean Moskovits’s leadership include:

  • recognition of our faculty members and students with numerous national and international honors, including Nobel Prizes, elections to the National Academies, and many other major awards;
  • establishment of seven new endowed chairs within the MLPS Division;
  • completion of nearly $100 million in MLPS capital projects, including the Life Sciences Building, Marine Sciences Research Building, and Psychology Building Addition;
  • recruitment and retention of many world-class leaders on our faculty, including 73 new faculty members in MLPS;
  • establishment of six new research centers and institutes within the MLPS Division, including the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind and the Vernon and Mary Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration;
  • major successes in raising funds from both private and public sectors.

Prior to joining UC Santa Barbara, Dr. Moskovits was a professor of physical chemistry and former chair of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Toronto. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a former Guggenheim Fellow, with numerous awards and honors to his name. In 2005 he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which cited his distinguished research in surface and cluster physics and chemistry, as well as his seminal contributions to the understanding of surface-enhanced spectroscopy. Also in 2005, Dr. Moskovits was honored with UCSB’s Worster Chair for the Dean of Science, an endowed chair established by Susan and Bruce Worster in honor of Dean Moskovits’s outstanding leadership as a dean and a scientist.

Executive Vice Chancellor Gene Lucas and I have begun a campus consultation process so that we can appoint an acting dean in the very near future. We will also be forming a search advisory committee to begin a national search for our next MLPS dean.

Please join us in congratulating Dean Moskovits and wishing him well with this exciting next step in his life and career. We are pleased that Martin and his wife, Linda, will continue to be part of our UCSB family, and we look forward to Martin’s ongoing contributions to our Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

Sincerely,

Henry T. Yang
Chancellor