I am honored to serve Soka University in the capacity as Vice President for Sponsored Research and External Academic Relations. In this role, I will help foster new externally funded projects that will help SUA’s faculty expand their research and scholarship and also enable SUA as an institution to more fully realise many of its strategic priorities.  I will also be working to expand connections between SUA and regional and peer institutions, to enable SUA to have more academic collaborations and partnerships as it expands and becomes more recognised as a world leader in global liberal arts and as it defines and builds on its mission for fostering global citizenship.

From July 2017 to August 2020 I served as Soka University’s Dean of Faculty, where I was responsible for managing the undergraduate program with its innovative Soka University curriculum and dynamic faculty, and its energetic and diverse community of students. As Dean of Faculty I had the wonderful opportunity to work with SUA faculty to help develop a new interdisciplinary Life Sciences program, develop new programs for incentivising faculty research, to help improve teaching at SUA, help SUA connect with peer liberal arts institutions, and improve Soka’s unique Core and GE curriculum. I was especially grateful for the opportunity to develop the 2018 Globalised Liberal Arts conference, co-organized by SUA, Pomona College, Carleton College, Middlebury College, and  Yale University, work with the Science Advisory Board and SUA faculty to develop the new Life Sciences curriculum, and to work with faculty and administration to develop the new Fellowship advising program, the new CPT program, the accelerated MA degree program with CGU, the new Merit program, the Teaching Innovation Grant program, more inclusive practices in search committees, and to help guide our transition to online instruction with new training programs for faculty. I feel especially grateful to have been able to help recruit 9 excellent new tenure-track faculty to SUA in fields ranging from Studio Art, Writing, Biochemistry, Sociology, French, Mathematics, Molecular and Cellular Biology, and Biology and am delighted to be able help bring these amazing professors to our academic community.

While I was Dean of Faculty I took a break from posting on this site, but now as my role at SUA is more externally facing, I will begin posting again to provide some details about recent innovations and developments at Soka University and in my other work on global liberal arts and STEM education and research.