A New Day for the Graduate School

I note with great pleasure that this week Dr. Norberto Grzywacz has joined the Georgetown community as Dean of the Graduate School. Before arriving on the Hilltop, Norberto was the Dwight C. and Hildagarde E. Baum Chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering; he was director of the USC Neuroscience Graduate Program for 5 years; he was the director of both the USC Center for Vision Science and Technology (CVST) and the Visual Processing Laboratory (VPL).

For several years he has led a research program in developing a framework of understanding how the brain “sees.” This requires using knowledge from neuroscience, physics, cognitive science, cellular biology, biomedical engineering, and mathematical and computational modeling. He is the author and co-author of scores of peer-reviewed scholarly articles and principal investigator on large research grants. At Georgetown he will be a Professor of Neuroscience and an Affiliate Professor of Physics. He will continue some of his computationally-oriented research during his term as dean.

He received his Bachelors degrees in Physics and Mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1980. In 1984, he received his Ph.D. in Neurobiology from the same institution. From 1984 to 1991, he was first a postdoctoral fellow and then a Research Scientist at the Center for Biological Information Processing of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That year, he moved to the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco, where he became a Senior Scientist in 1994. In September of 2001, he joined the USC Department of Biomedical Engineering as a Professor.

Consistent with the new Graduate School’s vision, Dean Grzywacz will coordinate and lead faculty in building new interdisciplinary graduate programs that build on the current strengths of Georgetown. These are consistent with the strategic goal of serving the large numbers of post-BA/BS who arrive in Washington each year to working in Federal, nonprofit, and private sector organizations. He’ll continue the work of Interim Dean Rebeck in mounting a review protocol of graduate programs that assures that graduate students are best served by Georgetown. He will collaborate with Todd Olson and others in Student Affairs to improve the extracurricular lives of graduate students when possible. He’ll work to rationalize and, when possible, improve the financial support for graduate students.

I’ve found Norberto filled with energy and imagination. He is very widely read and appreciates intellectual thought from a variety of perspectives. He is anxious to meet with chairs and unit heads throughout the university. I hope I join all my colleagues in pledging him the best of what the Georgetown community can offer in supporting his success.

Welcome to Georgetown, Norberto!