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jnw | 1/6/2011

Administrative Message

May 19, 2006

To: UC Santa Cruz Community

From: Denice D. Denton and David S. Kliger

Re: Appointments of New Deans

We are delighted to announce that the UC Regents voted unanimously yesterday to approve the appointments of Stephen Thorsett as Dean of the Physical and Biological Sciences Division and Georges Van Den Abbeele as Dean of the Humanities Division. The appointments take effect July 1.

Professor Thorsett's considerable administrative experience at UCSC includes service as associate dean in the division and chair and associate chair of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. He also chaired the Academic Senate Committee on Research and served for two years as the Senate's parliamentarian. The author of more than 100 scientific publications, primarily on radio pulsars and gamma-ray bursts, he has made important contributions in astronomy and astrophysics. For example, he has used radio pulsar timing to confirm aspects of general relativity and to investigate binary systems, neutron star masses, and planets around pulsars.

Van Den Abbeele will join us from UC Davis where he is a professor of French and Italian. He has held a number of significant administrative appointments overseeing academic departments and directing local and regional interdisciplinary research centers. Since 1997, Professor Van Den Abbeele has been the director of the Davis Humanities Institute, a campuswide unit established to foster and support humanistically oriented research by UC Davis faculty. He also directs the Pacific Regional Humanities Center, one of nine regional humanities centers established in 2002 through a National Endowment for the Humanities competition.

For further details about our new deans' academic and administrative achievements, please see the campus press releases on these two appointments:

- Stephen Thorsett
http://press.ucsc.edu/text.asp?pid=872

- Georges Van Den Abbeele
http://press.ucsc.edu/text.asp?pid=871

We also invite the campus community to join us in thanking Professor Gary Lease most heartily for his service as Interim Dean of the Humanities. Professor Lease has steered the division through a challenging period, and his work has set the stage for the division's bright future.

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