UI losing vice chancellor for research, top chemistry professor to Yale – Champaign/Urbana News-Gazette

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Peter Schiffer

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CHAMPAIGN The vice chancellor for research at the University of Illinois and a top chemistry professor on campus are both leaving after five years for two newly created positions at Yale.

Vice Chancellor Peter Schiffer and his wife, Professor Sharon Hammes-Schiffer, who holds one of the prestigious Swanlund endowed faculty chairs on campus, were recruited by Yale, officials at the two schools announced Thursday.

Schiffer, a Yale alumnus, will be the Ivy League school's inaugural vice provost for research, starting in October.

He will be joined at Yale in January by Hammes-Schiffer, who will be the inaugural John Gamble Kirkwood Professor of Chemistry. At the UI, she is a renowned theoretical chemist who specializes in modeling quantum mechanical processes in systems relevant to both energy and biological sciences. She was recently named to the Center for Advanced Study at Illinois, the highest honor the campus bestows.

"It's a really exciting opportunity for me and for Sharon," Schiffer said Thursday. "Yale is, like Illinois, a great research institution."

It's also a chance to be closer to their sons, Zachary and Benjamin, who are students at MIT and Princeton, respectively, he said.

Hammes-Schiffer was out of town and unavailable for comment Thursday.

Schiffer, an experimental physicist, joined the UI in 2012 as vice chancellor for research after five years as associate vice president for research and director of strategic initiatives at Penn State.

He earned his bachelor's degree in physics from Yale in 1988 and a doctorate in physics from Stanford in 1993. He then did postdoctoral work at AT&T Bell Laboratories before launching his faculty career as an assistant professor of physics at Notre Dame.

Schiffer said his job at Yale, upgraded from a deputy provost's position, will be similar to his UI post.

It was created to bring a new level of strategic attention to Yale's science and research enterprise, according to President Peter Salovey and Provost Benjamin Polak. They cited Schiffer's decade of experience in university leadership and noted his record of strategic planning, policy development and leadership in campuswide cross-disciplinary initiatives.

Schiffer's UI tenure coincided with the growth of the university's interdisciplinary research enterprise, recognized as "one of the very best in the world," with seven campus institutes, UI Chancellor Robert Jones said in a statement. Those include two new entities the Institute for Sustainability, Energy and Environment and the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute, both identified as priorities in an earlier campus strategic plan.

Schiffer said he expects those research areas to continue to grow, especially with the addition of the Carle Illinois College of Medicine. In the last month, the UI has announced a new Cancer Center and a $104 million Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.

He is also proud of the improved support for researchers in the humanities and areas outside the traditional science, technology, engineering and math fields, or STEM.

"It's a great place, and I've really enjoyed working here," he said.

Hammes-Schiffer is considered one of the world's leading experts in computational studies of proton-coupled electron transfer, an important process for many chemical reactions, Department of Chemistry head Martin Gruebele said. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

She will continue her research and teaching this fall before leaving for Yale in January, he said.

Her "collegiality and citizenship will be missed along with the high quality of her science," he said.

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UI losing vice chancellor for research, top chemistry professor to Yale - Champaign/Urbana News-Gazette