Paul Houston appointed senior associate dean in Arts and Sciences

Paul L. Houston, Cornell professor of chemistry and chemical biology, has been appointed senior associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, effective July 1.

Houston will join Dean Philip E. Lewis and Senior Associate Dean Jonathan Culler as a chief academic officer of the college. Houston fills the position previously occupied by Jon C. Clardy, the Horace White Professor of Chemistry. Clardy will resume full-time research and instruction.

Houston is a distinguished member of the College of Arts and Sciences faculty, with an international reputation for research in the fields of materials and physical chemistry. He also has distinguished himself at Cornell by his excellence in teaching and advising at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. He served as chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology from 1997 to 2001. In commenting on the appointment, Dean Lewis praised Houston's interdisciplinary research efforts across campus. "As a researcher Paul Houston has developed collaborative relations with faculty in the College of Engineering and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences," Lewis said. "These connections in both the physical and the life sciences will be of great benefit to the university as Paul assumes his role in overseeing the activities of many departments and programs in Arts and Sciences and representing the college in diverse campus venues. Paul has also been an exemplary faculty citizen whose experience in the conduct of faculty business in the Arts College has prepared him well for his new responsibilities."

Houston earned his B.S. degree at Yale University in 1969 and his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1973. He held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California-Berkeley before coming to Cornell as an assistant professor in 1975. By 1985 he was a full professor, and in 1999 he was named the Peter J.W. Debye Professor of Chemistry. He has held visiting scientist positions at the Max-Plank Institute for Quantum Optics and at the Institute for Molecular Science in Okazaki, Japan. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and has been an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and a J. Simon Guggenheim Fellow. He served as senior editor of The Journal of Physical Chemistry from 1991 to 1997 and on the advisory boards of that journal (1988-1990) and The Journal of Chemical Physics (1989-1991). He was honored with the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award in 1980 and with the Herbert P. Broida Prize of the APS in 2001.

Houston heads an active research group in chemistry, pursuing three main lines of investigation: photodissociation dynamics, dynamics of molecules on solid surfaces, and crossed molecular beam studies of reactions. He serves on the executive committee of the biocomplexity and biogeochemistry initiative and recently was the lead investigator on a National Science Foundation application with 20 other Cornell scientists for funds to establish an Environmental Molecular Sciences Institute at Cornell. The list of publications emanating from the Houston group reflects frequent appearances in every major journal in the field.