NEWS RELEASE
June 17, 2008
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Note to journalists: A publication-quality photograph of Paula Allen-Meares is available at http://www.uillinois.edu/our/images/)
Paula Allen-Meares selected to lead University of Illinois at Chicago
Dean of social work is member of Institute of Medicine of the National Academies
CHICAGO, Ill. — Paula Allen-Meares, dean of the nationally top-ranked school of social work at the University of Michigan, has been selected as the next chancellor of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), pending formal approval by the Board of Trustees.
The chancellor serves as the executive officer of the UIC campus and reports to the president of the University of Illinois in a system that includes campuses in Urbana-Champaign and Springfield and the university's online Global Campus.
Allen-Meares would take office effective Jan. 16, 2009, and would assume the helm of a UIC campus that ranks 47th nationally in federally funded research, enrolls 25,000 undergraduate, graduate and professional students, employs 12,000 faculty and staff and operates with a total annual budget of about $1.7 billion. It is the largest university in Chicago.
U. of I. President B. Joseph White said Allen-Meares was selected from a field of more than 100 who expressed interest in the chancellorship. A 20-member search advisory committee culled the field to 17 candidates and five finalists were interviewed by the Board of Trustees.
"Paula Allen-Meares is a high-aspiration, high-achieving leader who for 15 years has kept a professional school of a leading university at the very top of the national rankings. The search committee described Paula as a role model for the UIC community, an academic leader and highly productive scholar who is personally involved in vital areas of improving peoples' lives," White said. "She will lead UIC through its next level of development as a great urban research university."
Allen-Meares has been dean of the school of social work at the University of Michigan since 1993 and is the Norma Radin Collegiate Professor of Social Work as well as a professor of education at the university. Prior to joining the University of Michigan, Allen-Meares was a professor and dean of the school of social work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she received her master's and Ph.D. degrees. Her bachelor's degree was earned at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
"The mission of the University of Illinois at Chicago reflects my strong beliefs: ‘to create knowledge that transforms our views of the world and, through sharing and application, transforms the world.' For this reason, I am deeply honored to become the next chancellor at UIC," Allen-Meares said.
"My vision is to continue to create knowledge and put knowledge to work as we educate the next cohorts of students. I hope to build on and strengthen bonds with the other campuses that comprise the University of Illinois system so that together we can make a real difference in communities, in the nation and around the globe," Allen-Meares said.
U. of I. Board of Trustees Chair Lawrence C. Eppley said Allen-Meares' experience and accomplishments made her the leading choice for the UIC chancellorship.
"Paula Allen-Meares has exactly the right stuff that an ascendant UIC requires in a chancellor. She is a proven success as a builder and driver of a nationally acclaimed academic enterprise, with an intellectual energy and vigor to match her personal dynamism," Eppley said. "She understands the importance of fundraising at a public university and has succeeded in building the endowment of the school of social work at Michigan.
"Moreover, we're proud to claim her as a member of University of Illinois family, an alumna, faculty member and dean before going to Michigan. We heartily welcome her back to the U. of I. fold," Eppley said.
The Board of Trustees will act on Allen-Meares' nomination as UIC chancellor at its scheduled July 24 meeting. In addition to the UIC chancellorship, Allen-Meares would hold faculty appointments in social work and education at the UIC and Urbana campuses.
Allen-Meares said UIC's role as a health care provider and leading educator of health care professionals and the campus' Great Cities Commitment of engagement with the Chicago community are areas of common interest with her research and scholarship.
The interdisciplinary nature of the school of social work at Michigan involves joint appointments with medicine, social sciences, psychiatry and the school of art. A joint doctoral program in social work and social science engages the social science disciplines of anthropology, economics, political science, psychology and sociology with social work.
Allen-Meares' academic career has been distinguished during the nearly four decades since she first enrolled in the master's of social work program on the U. of I. Urbana-Champaign campus, where she rose between 1970 and 1993 from graduate student and teaching assistant in the school of social work to professor and dean of the school. Her interest and expertise focus on social work as it relates to educational settings and adolescents. In addition to her administrative experience as a dean at Michigan and Illinois, Allen-Meares has conducted extensive research in her field and her findings have been widely published.
Allen-Meares is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies and is a trustee of the New York Academy of Medicine. At Michigan's school of social work, she is principal investigator of the Global Program on Youth, an initiative supported by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and the principal investigator of the Skillman Good Neighborhoods Grant and the National Institute of Mental Health's Social Work Research Center on Poverty, Risk and Mental Health.
Additional biographical information and a complete curriculum vitae are posted at http://www.uillinois.edu/ChancellorSearch/.
The president of the University of Michigan, Mary Sue Coleman, said: "Paula Allen-Meares has given our campus energy and vision and established the School of Social Work as one of the top in the country. Paula has provided distinguished leadership at the University of Michigan and I am delighted for her in this new role and wish her the very best."
Elliot Kaufman, UIC professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics and chair of the search advisory committee for chancellor, said Allen-Meares represents "strong and dynamic new leadership" for UIC.
"The committee members and I are extremely pleased with the successful outcome of the UIC chancellor search," Kaufman said. "Our new chancellor rose from a field of very accomplished, talented and experienced leaders, each of whom demonstrated the high regard in which UIC is held in the higher education community and beyond. We can all be proud of UIC's past accomplishments and excited about its future with such strong and dynamic new leadership."
White applauded the search committee chair and his colleagues for their work. "I thank Elliot Kaufman and the members of the search committee for a superb job in a very robust search. The sense of UIC from the candidates was that this is the right university at the right place at the right time. The past is impressive and the future is extraordinarily promising," White said.
Former Chancellor Sylvia Manning retired last December after eight years at the UIC helm. During Manning's tenure, UIC moved into the top 50 universities nationally in federal research funding at more than $200 million annually. Eric A. "Rick" Gislason, vice chancellor for research at UIC, has served as interim chancellor and will remain in the job until next January, when he plans to retire.
Between July and next January, Allen-Meares will transition between her Michigan deanship and the UIC chancellorship, as well as major research projects that include four in which she acts as principal or co-principal investigator.
Allen-Meares is a native of Buffalo. Her spouse, Henry Meares, is assistant dean for external relations in the school of education at the University of Michigan. They will reside in the UIC Chancellor's Residence, a townhouse on historic Jackson Boulevard adjacent to the campus, that was bequeathed for this purpose by the late Dr. Olga Jonasson, a long time UIC professor and surgeon.
UIC consists of 15 colleges, including the nation's largest college of medicine, and operates the state's major public medical center. With six health sciences colleges, UIC is the principal educator of physicians, dentists, pharmacists, nurses and other health professionals serving the state. A hallmark of the campus is the Great Cities Commitment, through which UIC faculty, students and staff engage with community, corporate, foundation and government partners in hundreds of programs to improve the quality of life in metropolitan areas around the world.
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The University of Illinois enrolls 70,000 undergraduate and graduate students at campuses in Urbana-Champaign, Chicago, Springfield and online, and it awards approximately 18,000 degrees annually. http://www.uillinois.edu/our/news/2008/june17.allen.meares.cfm
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