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  Alexander Cartwright

By JOHN DELLACONTRADA

Published: June 16 2010

Alexander N. Cartwright, chair of the departments of Electrical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering, has been named interim vice president for research, Provost Satish K. Tripathi announced today.

His appointment is effective July 1.  He succeeds Jorge V. José, who is leaving UB to become system vice president for research at Indiana University.

“We are very pleased that Alex has agreed to serve in this role,” Tripathi said. “He is a remarkable scholar, as well as an outstanding university citizen who has been instrumental in building signature university initiatives, including the strategic strengths and new Department of Biomedical Engineering.”  

Cartwright will take a one-year leave from his positions as chair of the departments of Electrical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering in order to serve in this interim position.

Over the past two years, Cartwright has been instrumental in establishing UB’s new focus on biomedical engineering, a joint effort between the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. This year, he was named chair of the new department. He previously served as UB’s vice provost for strategic initiatives, functioning as the point person in the Provost's Office for the UB 2020 strategic strengths initiatives. He helped build the research infrastructure and foster collaboration across multiple strategic strengths of the UB 2020 plan. 

A UB faculty member since 1995, Cartwright conducts research on the development of sensors with biomedical applications, such as the development of devices that sense the wound microenvironment and release wound-healing compounds when needed. His work also focuses on the optical properties of semiconductor nanostructures and he is involved in the development of hybrid inorganic and organic materials and device structures for solar cells, design and fabrication of biological and chemical sensors, and development of methods for testing stress and strain of electrical devices. He also is engineering optical “metamaterials,” artificial materials that provide optical properties not readily available in nature.

Cartwright has strong experience working with state and federal funding agencies, both as an award recipient and as a reviewer for such agencies as the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Institutes of Health. He also has worked extensively with private industry and has been involved in projects for which UB’s intellectual property has been licensed to companies.

He serves as a director of the Institute for Lasers, Photonics and Biophotonics, and he previously served as director of UB’s NSF Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) in “Biophotonics: Materials and Applications.” He also co-directs UB’s Electronic Packaging Laboratory.

An adjunct faculty member in the Department of Physics, College of Arts and Sciences, Cartwright also is an active member of the Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors in UB Engineering.

He has won numerous prestigious research awards, among them the Department of Defense ONR Young Investigator Award and the NSF CAREER award.

Cartwright received a Sustained Achievement Award during the 2010 Celebration of Academic Excellence as a UB Exceptional Scholar. In addition to demonstrated research excellence, he received the 2002 SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching. Cartwright also participated in UB's 2006-07 Faculty in Leadership class, designed to give faculty members administrative duties that acquaint them with important issues in higher education.

He earned bachelor’s and doctoral degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Iowa.