Physics Professor Sarah Church relinquishes post as HEPL Director to become senior associate vice provost for undergraduate education
Church, who will assume her new role Sept. 1, succeeds Stanford biology Professor Elizabeth A. "Liz" Hadley, who will complete her three-year term on Aug. 31.
Stanford physics Professor Sarah Church will become the senior associate vice provost for undergraduate education on Sept. 1. Harry J. Elam Jr., vice provost for undergraduate education, recently announced the appointment.
Elam said Church will assist and advise him on the management of the Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education (VPUE) and on additional matters related to undergraduate education across campus.
Church chaired the Committee on Undergraduate Standards and Policies from 2013-2016, which in recent years has developed the pilot program for the joint majors program and new policies governing coterminal master’s degrees. She served on the ad hoc committee that designed Stanford’s new course-evaluation form.
Church, who joined Stanford’s faculty in 1999, served as the director of the Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory from 2013-2016 and the deputy director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology from 2007-2011.
Her research is focused on understanding how galaxies are formed and how they are evolving. As part of this effort, the Church Group is building an experiment to map the large-scale distribution of highly redshifted carbon monoxide.
Church also is leading the Argus experiment, a 16-pixel radio spectrometer at the 100-meter Green Bank Telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia – the world’s largest, fully steerable radio telescope – that will investigate star formations in nearby galaxies and our own.
In 2014, Stanford named Church the Pritzker University Fellow in Undergraduate Education in recognition of her extraordinary contributions to undergraduate education.
Elam said he is very excited that Church is joining VPUE in the fall.
Read the original story in the Stanford Report, August 2, 2016