The Office of Faculty Development is pleased to announce that Emily Heaphy, Associate Professor of Management, Sindiso MnisiWeeks, Associate Professor of Legal Studies, Bogdan Prokopovych, Senior Lecturer of Management, Grant Wilson , Professor of Astronomy, and Ximena Zúñiga , Professor of Student Development, have been awarded Chancellor’s Leadership Fellowships within Academic Affairs for the 2023-24 academic year.
"The Chancellor’s Leadership Fellows program provides an opportunity for faculty to expand their leadership development by advancing a project in an area of particular interest to them and benefit to the campus," explains Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Tricia Serio. "I am looking forward to collaborating with them in the coming year."
The Chancellor’s Leadership Fellowship (CLF) program seeks to cultivate future campus leaders by offering a half-time, one-year temporary appointment to an administrative area on campus and providing mentoring from the leader of the host unit. In addition, fellows are expected to launch a significant program during their fellowship year.
The CLF nomination and application process commences annually in January. Full-time tenured faculty, senior lecturers, and librarians on continuing appointments are eligible for the fellowship which is administered by the Office of Faculty Development.
Grant Wilson, Professor of Astronomy, will work on understanding and ameliorating institutional impediments to faculty taking on and managing their research grant portfolios. The goal is to identify ways to increase the total number of grant dollars per capita by identifying key areas of institutional investment, workflow bottlenecks, or any other areas of support that faculty identify as being critical to UMass' evolving research enterprise. Wilson will be working with Mike Malone, the Vice Chancellor of Research and Engagement.
Wilson did his graduate work in physics at Brown University where he studied cosmology by building balloon-borne instruments to measure the Cosmic Microwave Background - the oldest radiation in the Universe. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1998 he did postdoctoral work at NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center and then at the University of Chicago. Since coming to UMass in 2001, Professor Wilson won the College Outstanding Teacher Award and also built and deployed the AzTEC camera which helped to identify hundreds of new galaxies. Wilson chairs the Science Advisory Board of the Large Millimeter Telescope, is Director of the Graduate Program in Astronomy, and now leads a multi-national collaboration of scientists in the building and deploying the TolTEC camera - a revolutionary new imaging polarimeter.
"As a Chancellor's Leadership Fellow, my principal goal is to help to find ways to make research easier to manage and more efficient to conduct at UMass. Whether it is IT issues, space allocation issues, or availability of resources, it is critical that we understand what factors limit our existing research activities as well as what we even dare to propose," explains Wilson. "I hope to end this fellowship with a clear prioritized plan for what the administration could do to help maximize our research efforts."
Dr. Wilson's webpage on the UMass Astronomy Website can be found here: Grant Wilson | Department of Astronomy (umass.edu)