Farach-Cartson named first Associate Vice Provost for Research, begins 2009

By Matt McKee     9/4/08 7:00pm

As part of a growing investment in research, Rice University selected Mary Farach-Carson as its first associate vice provost for research. Farach- Carson, who currently teaches and directs research at the University of Delaware, will begin her work at Rice next fall. The creation of this position follows Rice's rapidly expanding interest in research and collaboration detailed in President David Leebron's Vision for the Second Century. In promoting research, Farach-Carson will help encourage and create links with the Texas Medical Center and will also become a part-time faculty member as a professor of biochemistry and cell biology. She will work extensively with the projects of the Collaborative Research Center, which is scheduled for completion in 2009.

Vice Provost for Research Jim Coleman said his office works with researchers from varying academic fields across Rice, as will Farach-Carson, but because one of her specific tasks is to forge collaborations between Rice faculty and faculty in the Texas Medical Center, she is likely to spend more time facilitating and developing projects. But Farach-Carson will also help build collaborations between humanities and social science faculty with faculty in the TMC.

Farach-Carson said her position was created to help foster interdisciplinary research. She hopes to assist researchers from different fields come together to work on projects addressing large issues.

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"I would view myself as a catalyst to help pursue more of those kind of projects," Farach-Carson said. "Clean water, renewable energy, global health ... all of these problems are so complicated that no one researcher can tackle them anymore, and I firmly believe that the only way to tackle these is to bring an interdisciplinary team together to work for common solutions."

At the University of Delaware, Farach-Carson is a professor of biological and material sciences, and she is a founding director of the Center for Translational Cancer Research. She said she looks forward to working with researchers from multiple disciplines and hopes to assist undergraduate students projects as well as projects from graduate students and faculty. In her lab at the University of Delaware, undergraduates work together on biomedical projects. Farach-Carson said her interest and commitment to research bloomed during her undergraduate years.

"We have an obligation to the next generation of scientists to give them research opportunities, and I just love it," Farach-Carson said. "When I come to Rice, I am sure that we will look for places in interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research efforts that allow [for] undergraduates, graduates, post docs and professors to work together."

Coleman, who has worked at the university for about 11 months, said he will work with Farach-Carson to provide infrastructure support for assisting researchers with grant proposals, equipment needs, dealing with federal regulations governing research and communication tools to find scholars interested in similar fields of work.

"Because of her biomedical background and her experience in the medical sciences, she has a lot of connections and a lot of understanding of what they're doing in the Texas Medical Center," Coleman said. "By her nature, she's extraordinarily energetic and collaborative, and those traits coupled with her scientific credibility have enabled her to build really strong collaborations at the University of Delaware. We are looking forward to her putting her substantial skill to work here at Rice in a similar way."

Born in Galveston, Texas, Farach-Carson grew up in Houston and received her Ph.D. in biochemistry from the Medical College of Virginia at Virginia Commonwealth University in 1982. She has worked at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and has taught at the University of Texas' Health Science Center. She left Houston for Newark, Del., in 1998 and looks forward to returning to Houston.

Her husband, Dan Carson, will come to Rice next January as the new dean of the Wiess School of Natural Sciences.

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