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Satish Tripathi meets the UB community
By SUE WUETCHER
Reporter Editor
It was not easy to convince his family that it was time to move again—this time to Buffalo, Satish Tripathi admitted. But UB's new provost—who was introduced to the university community via a Web broadcast on May 6—said that for him, the decision was a "no-brainer."
Incoming Provost Satish Tripathi
addresses the university community as President John B. Simpson looks
on.
PHOTO: NANCY J. PARISI
"I'm familiar with the excellence, the quality and the programs here at UB," said Tripathi, who will become UB's chief academic officer on July 1. "I like the fact that President Simpson is committed to taking UB to the top half of the AAU institutions."
Moreover, he said, he is excited about the chance to work with President John B. Simpson, who he worked with previously when Simpson was provost and executive vice chancellor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Tripathi currently is dean of the Bourns College of Engineering at the University of California, Riverside, and briefly served as acting executive vice chancellor for the campus.
Another selling point for UB, Tripathi noted, is that UB is one of the most comprehensive universities in the nation and the most comprehensive within the SUNY system.
That comprehensiveness is particularly important, he said, because as more universities focus on interdisciplinary work, some have problems bringing people together from different fields because they don't have them on campus. "And here, that already exists. We have this broad variety of disciplines that exist in one university," he said.
Tripathi said that his experiences as an administrator at the University of Maryland, where he was a faculty member for 19 years, and at UC Riverside have provided him with the "background to look at the university within two different frameworks."
He said that when he assumed the position of chair of the Department of Computer Science at Maryland in 1988, his goal was to bring the department, which at the time was the largest computer science department in the country and ranked within the top 15 departments nationwide, into the top 10—admittedly a tough task.
By the time he stepped down as chair seven years later, the department's national ranking had climbed at least into the top 12, he said. He orchestrated that improvement, he said, by identifying a few areas of excellence already within the department and investing in those areas "to make them better."
And interestingly, those areas were not just within computer science, he said, pointing out that he brought in faculty members from across the university—in linguistics, psychology, mathematics, electrical and mechanical engineering, geography and physics—to collaborate with computer scientists. Many of the initiatives undertaken by the computer science department were strong because "those people collaborated," he said.
"Building excellence in one department wasn't just building in one department," Tripathi said. "Excellence really was for the entire campus."
His goal at UB, he said, will be to work with Simpson, the faculty and the deans "to identify areas of excellence and bring them to international prominence."
At UC Riverside, the situation was totally different than that at Maryland. When he arrived at the university in 1997, the Bourns College of Engineering was "almost a brand new entity"—in existence only for about six years, he said.
"There, we had to lay out the strategies and plans—not just for building a college of engineering, but to build excellence," he said. "From the very get-go, the idea was we don't just want to build a college, we want to build something with a profile in the top 25 engineering schools."
During Tripathi's tenure, the Bourns College of Engineering has been one of the fastest growing schools of engineering in the U.S. Under his leadership, it has grown from a single department and one research center to four departments and five interdisciplinary research centers. The number of students has grown from 550 to approximately 2,000, and approximately 50 new faculty members have been recruited. The number of graduate students has grown from 37 to 289 in master's and doctoral programs.
Tripathi pointed out that since the college was new when he took over as dean, it probably was easier for him to build relationships with members of the Riverside campus community outside the college—within the humanities, the sciences, the arts and social sciences.
"What we have done is create research programs, and now we are creating undergraduate and graduate programs jointly with departments outside the college"—a major thrust of the college during the past couple of years, he said.
"Hopefully, the commitment that we had there can be translated in terms of creating excellence in new areas—new areas that go beyond just one discipline. And that's the experience I bring from Riverside."
His commitment to excellence is based not just on research funding, Tripathi stressed, noting that many of the areas that were built up were not necessarily the top producers in terms of research dollars.
"The commitment really is intellectual commitment, where people can have excellence; people from different areas can come together. That is what a research university is, as opposed to just looking at the research that's funded," he said. "A research university will not be great unless all areas across the campus are excellent.
"My goal is to work with the faculty, deans, staff and President Simpson to build excellence across the campus."