Division of the Physical Sciences Leadership Transition

To: PSD Affiliates and Senior Administrators
From: Paul Alivisatos, President, and Katherine Baicker, Provost
Subject: Division of the Physical Sciences Leadership Transition
Date: January 18, 2024

We write to share that Angela V. Olinto, the Albert A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, and the Enrico Fermi Institute, has been named provost of Columbia University, effective March 1. As provost, Angela will serve as Columbia’s chief academic officer, overseeing the work of its faculty and supporting more than 36,000 students. She will work closely with Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, who will share this news with the Columbia community later today.

This appointment is well deserved recognition of Angela’s international academic stature and talent as an administrator, and we are pleased to support her move to this important leadership role. She will bring to her new position the skills, expertise, and tenacious vision that we have been deeply fortunate to benefit from during her long tenure at the University of Chicago.

Angela has served as dean of the PSD since 2018. Her dynamic leadership and vision built on the division’s strong foundation to achieve new heights of eminence. Angela was instrumental in developing the University’s Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation and the Data Science Institute. She oversaw the creation of new academic programs in data science and supported new initiatives in the origins of life, plant biology, climate and life, and biological physics. Angela increased undergraduate enrollment in the division, expanded the PSD faculty, and launched new academic and teaching initiatives. In collaboration with key partners, she led the planning and development for a new research infrastructure for engineering and science units and the University’s new High Bay Research Building. Angela spearheaded the PSD Trailblazers project and has championed rigorous and diverse communities of scholars across the division. She also helped launch the annual South Side Science Festival, which has drawn thousands of community members to campus, and served on the Committee on Freedom of Expression that developed the “Chicago Principles.”

A member of the University since 1990, Angela joined the faculty in 1996. She was the first woman tenured in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, the first woman chair of a PSD department, and the first woman dean of the PSD. Angela is a leading scholar in astroparticle physics whose research has significantly contributed to the understanding of the inflationary origins of the universe, the cosmological effects of magnetic fields, the structure of neutron stars, and the highest energy cosmic rays, gamma-rays, and neutrinos. She is the principal investigator of NASA’s Probe of Extreme Multi-Messenger Astrophysics space and balloon missions and the Extreme Universe Space Observatory on a Super Pressure Balloon mission and was also a leading member of the Pierre Auger Observatory.

We are deeply grateful to Angela for her extraordinary contributions to the PSD and to the University. In her 33 years at UChicago, Angela served as an exemplary University citizen in all of her roles, and her contributions will have enduring impact. Please join us in thanking Angela for her dedicated service to the University.

Information about interim leadership of the PSD will be forthcoming.

Keywords

Leadership