the Rice Thresher

Issue date: 9/5/08 Section: News

Associate Vice Provost for Research Mary Farach-Carson

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.

"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.

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