Glenn Steele will serve second term as BSD Dean

Glenn Steele, the Richard T. Crane Professor in Surgery, has been appointed to a second five-year term as Dean of the Division of Biological Sciences and the Pritzker School of Medicine and as Vice President for Medical Affairs.

“Glenn’s intellectual leadership over the past five years has attracted a remarkable number of distinguished new department chairs and senior scientists and inspired confidence and a sense of new possibilities in the division,” President Sonnenschein said in announcing the reappointment.

“He has led efforts to develop a number of inter-departmental research centers and has played a key role in shaping plans for the joint BSD-PSD Institute. He also has exhibited a profound commitment to teaching and education at the undergraduate, graduate and medical-student levels.”

Since coming to the University in 1995, Steele has been involved in the recruitment of many outstanding scholars, including new chairmen for 12 departments, and in the establishment and growth of two new departments, Human Genetics and Health Studies.

He has worked to build on established research strengths, particularly in the neurosciences, which have been invigorated by the recruitment of new chairmen for the departments of Neurobiology, Pharmacology & Physiology; Neurology; and Psychiatry, which has quickly become the leading U.S. center for the study of the genetics of mental illness.

He also has been instrumental in the creation of the Interdivisional Research Building, designed to enhance scientific collaboration by bringing researchers from very different fields into close proximity to one another. This 375,000-square-foot, $131-million building, scheduled to open in 2003, will house a unique combination of programs from the biological and physical sciences.

Steele studied history and literature at Harvard University, earned his medical degree from New York University and his Ph.D. in immunology from the University of Lund. He taught at Harvard for 20 years, where he built his reputation as one of the country’s leading cancer surgeons and as an authority on the cell biology of gastrointestinal cancer. He served for 10 years as chairman of a renowned department of surgery at Harvard’s New England Deaconess Hospital before coming to Chicago in June 1995.