"Steve has been a remarkable provost of Caltech for nine years," said Caltech president David Baltimore. "His devotion to his alma mater provided exemplary leadership to Caltech's unique and very effective style of faculty-driven governance over this period. Steve's extraordinary ability to analyze an issue, extract the key elements and provide solutions has made working with him particularly rewarding. Caltech will miss Steve's leadership but he has given all one can expect to the very difficult provost's job and I personally will miss his companionship."
Koonin, a 1972 alumnus of Caltech, joined the Caltech faculty in 1975, became full professor in 1981, and served as chairman of the faculty from 1989 to 1991.
"My time as the Institute's provost has been exhilarating, challenging, and rewarding. I've had the opportunity to work closely with, and learn from, two Caltech presidents. It has been a privilege (and a great deal of fun) to have helped formulate, articulate, and implement a compelling vision for the Institute's academic program," said Koonin.
He has overseen a major capital campaign and fund-raising initiative for Caltech's biological sciences, the implementation of a new administrative computing system, and the establishment of a relationship with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation through a series of proposals that will shape the institute through the next decade. Among these has been Thirty-Meter Telescope project, in which he has played a leading administrative role.
Koonin derives greatest satisfaction from the people at Caltech, having overseen the hiring of some 110 of the Institute's 280 active professorial faculty and the appointment of six chairs of Caltech's academic divisions. During his tenure, the campus' research and educational activities grew by almost 40 percent.
"As I reflect on my time at Caltech, what emerges most clearly is the underlying strength of Caltech's research and teaching that stems from the quality of our students, faculty, and staff and the support from so many friends of the Institute," Koonin said.
He is looking forward to the challenges the new job will present to him. "This new position will afford me the opportunity to do some strategic thinking about one of the most important problems facing society--energy," Koonin said. "Among other duties, I will be responsible for technical input to the company's long-range strategies in an industry that has important economic, social, political, and environmental dimensions."
Koonin is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has served on a number of advisory committees for the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Defense and its various national laboratories. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His research interests include theoretical nuclear, many-body, and computational physics, nuclear astrophysics, and global environmental science.
He is a longtime member (and most recent chair) of the JASONs, advisers to the Department of Defense on technical issues associated with national security.
While serving as Caltech's provost, Koonin has continued to conduct research. His most recent project involves "earthshine" a phenomenon that allows the state of the earth's climate to be monitored by the brightness of sunlight reflected off the earth onto the dark part of the lunar disk. That brightness has diminished and then increased by a surprising amount during the past decade, suggesting a more variable global climate than is commonly assumed.
Koonin, who was born in Brooklyn, New York, earned his bachelor's degree in physics from Caltech in 1972, and a PhD in theoretical physics from MIT in 1975. Early in his career, he was a research fellow at the Niels Bohr Institute from 1976 to 1977 and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow from 1977 to 1979. In 1975-76, he received the Associated Students of Caltech Teaching Award, and the Humboldt Senior U.S. Scientist Award in 1985. In 1999 he received the E. O. Lawrence Award in Physics from the Department of Energy.
Koonin is the institute's seventh provost, a position created in 1962. A faculty committee will advise Baltimore on the selection of Koonin's successor. Edward M. Stolper, chair of the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, will be acting provost. ###
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