Additional VC candidates due on campus

by Daniel J. Fitzgibbons, Chronicle staff

he national search for a vice chancellor for Research took a local turn late last week when officials announced that one of the candidates is Computer Science professor W. Richards Adrion.

     Adrion has been on leave from campus since January to serve as division director for Experimental and Integrative Activities in the Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation. Like two earlier candidates for the vice chancellor's slot, Adrion has been invited to come to campus for open meetings with faculty, staff, postdoctoral researchers and students. His visit is scheduled for Oct. 30.

In an e-mail circulated on campus on Oct. 20, Provost Cora Marrett and search chair Michael Malone said a fourth candidate, Larry Lemanski, associate vice president for research at Texas A&M University, is slated to visit campus on Nov. 6 (Biographical information and meeting times for Lemanski's visit will be published next week).

     On Monday, P. Michael Conn, director of the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center took part in forums with various campus groups. Conn is also special assistant to the president and professor of physiology and pharmacology at Oregon Health Sciences University.

     Adrion joined the faculty in 1986 as chair of the Computer Science Department, a post he held for eight years. Along with his faculty duties, he is also director of the Centers for Research on Intelligent Complex Computing Systems.

     In his current role at NSF, Adrion heads an $80 million unit that manages a portfolio of research, workforce, education and infrastructure programs. Current research includes projects in advanced systems, digital governance, the interface of biology and information technology, quantum computing and interactive education. Adrion directs a staff of 15 program managers and seven administrative support personnel.

     Adrion founded and, until 1999, served as president and chairman of the board of the Applied Computing Systems Institute of Massachusetts (ACSIOM), a University-affiliated corporation designed to transfer information and telecommunications technology developed at the University.

     Prior to his appointment to the faculty, he held permanent and visiting positions with the University of Texas at Austin, Oregon State University, National Science Foundation, National Bureau of Standards, American University, Georgetown University, the University of California, Berkeley and the Universite' de Paris-Sud Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique.

     Adrion founded and served as editor-in-chief for the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology from 1989-95. He has chaired a number of conferences and symposia, including the 1994 SIGSOFT Symposium and the 1997 International Conference on Software Engineering. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Association for Computing Machinery, and in 1996 received the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Service Award.

     Adrion has served on a number of University system and campus committees, including the Academic Priorities Council; Program and Budget Council; University Information Technology Council; the system and campus economic development task forces; University Conflicts Committee; Research Foundation Task Force; Research Council; an ad hoc Committee on five-campus reorganization; and the Strategic Planning Council.

     Adrion's current research is on the analysis and verification of concurrent, real-time computing systems and, in particular, issues related to the interplay between non-deterministic constructs and resource-bounded scheduling.

     With Jim Kurose of Computer Science, he directs the Multimedia Asynchronous Networked Instructional Courseware (MANIC) Project and is developing and deploying streamed multimedia materials and assessing their effectiveness. Based on his involvement with day-to-day technology transfer management, Adrion is examining various strategies and approaches for effective technology transfer and diffusion through case studies.