Weber Named Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Education

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- A. Scott Weber, PhD, has been named vice provost and dean of undergraduate education at the University at Buffalo after an internal search, UB Provost Satish K. Tripathi announced today.

His appointment is effective June 1. Weber succeeds Michael Ryan, who at the end of May will step down from the post in order to oversee UB's Middle States reaccreditation process.

For the past five years, Weber, a resident of Getzville, has served as professor and chair of the UB Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Since 1998, he has served as director of the UB Center for Integrated Waste Management.

As vice provost and dean of undergraduate education, Weber will lead university-wide efforts to ensure that UB undergraduate students have a transformative educational experience with opportunities to engage in truly distinctive research and creative and public-service activities that are hallmarks of a top-tier university education.

"Scott Weber has a deep commitment to UB and to ensuring that we provide our undergraduate students with experiences that will enrich their education and add value and meaning to their lives after they graduate," Tripathi said.

Weber will provide leadership for centralized undergraduate student support services and transformative extracurricular programs. His responsibilities will focus on oversight of undergraduate programs and services that have a direct impact on the undergraduate education experience at UB. These include: student advisement, general education, undergraduate admissions, the UB Honors College, undergraduate research, minority enhancement programs, student academic records and financial services, and undergraduate experience programs.

"I am very pleased to be given the opportunity to help build on and improve the quality and vitality of the undergraduate academic experience at UB," Weber said. "The undergraduate experience is foundational to all that we do as a premier research university, and thus I am committed to working to the best of my ability to make this experience the most enriching and rewarding it can be."

As chair of the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering, Weber helped establish UB's transportation engineering research program and oversaw the department's rise to No. 27 in the nation among all U.S. civil engineering programs, according to U.S. News and World Report. He also helped craft and implement a new shared vision and direction for the department and MCEER (formerly the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research). His work in these areas and initiatives helped generate a sense of excitement and energy among UB students, faculty and staff in the department, Tripathi noted.

Weber has been a member of the UB faculty since 1983 and twice was named professor of the year by the UB student chapter of Tau Beta Pi, the engineering honor society. His teaching focus is in the areas of environmental engineering, with a specialization in biological process analysis and design for soil and water bioremediation. His current research efforts are directed toward biodegradation of chemicals in water and soil, particularly pharmaceuticals and the reclamation of environmentally impacted sites known as brownfields.

In 2007, Weber and professor Louis P. Zicari Jr., associate director of the UB Center for Integrated Waste Management, were awarded a $1.8 million grant by Empire State Development to develop a program to expand the use of recycled tires in construction applications through research and education.

He received his BS in civil engineering in 1977 and an MS in sanitary engineering in 1978 from Virginia Tech. In 1983 he earned a PhD in civil engineering from the University of California, Davis.