I am pleased to announce the appointment of Rebecca W. Doerge, Ph.D., as Provost, effective August 1, 2023. Rebecca joins the Rensselaer community from Carnegie Mellon University, where she is the Glen de Vries Dean of the Mellon College of Science and a member of the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences’ Department of Statistics and Data Science and the Mellon College of Science’s Department of Biological Sciences.

As dean, she launched a future of science initiative to bring together Carnegie Mellon’s strengths in automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data analytics with the foundational sciences. The initiative includes construction of the Richard King Mellon Hall of Sciences and the Carnegie Mellon University Cloud Lab, the first such lab at a university.

Rebecca’s research focuses on statistical bioinformatics, an interdisciplinary component of bioinformatics that brings together many scientific disciplines for the purpose of asking, answering, and disseminating biologically interesting information in the quest to understand the ultimate function of DNA and epigenomic associations. Prior to joining Carnegie Mellon in 2016, she was the Trent and Judith Anderson Distinguished Professor of Statistics at Purdue University, and she held a joint appointment between the Colleges of Agriculture (Department of Agronomy) and Science (Department of Statistics).

A native of upstate New York, as a first-generation student Rebecca studied theoretical mathematics at the University of Utah. She obtained her Ph.D. in statistics from North Carolina State University, and she was a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University, studying biometry and plant breeding.

Rebecca is an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association (2007) and the American
Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) (2007), and a Fellow of the Committee on
Institutional Cooperation (2009). She previously served as chair of the AAAS Statistics Section (2020), on the Board of Trustees for the National Institute of Statistical Sciences and the Mathematical Biosciences Institute; and as a member of the Global Open-Source Breeding Informatics Initiative Advisory Board. She has published two books and more than 120 scientific articles. Rebecca has mentored many students, including 25 doctoral students who have successfully defended their theses.

I would like to thank the Provost Recruitment Committee for their efforts and a special thanks to Dr. Mary Simoni for her outstanding contributions as Acting Provost.

Please join me in welcoming Dr. Rebecca Doerge as Provost.