Schramm named VP for Research

Schramm will work in collaboration with the Vice President for Argonne National Laboratory to coordinate academic and scientific relationships with Argonne, and he will lead the University's analysis of and response to government science and research policies. Working with Provost Geoffrey Stone, Schramm will chair the Council on Research and oversee the Office of Research Administration.

"David brings to his new position a combination of extraordinary scientific accomplishment, tremendous energy, a taste for excellence and the ability to explain to diverse audiences the importance of science and the special qualities of the University of Chicago," President Sonnenschein said. "I look forward to working with him to make this the very best place for distinguished scholars to conduct their work."

Schramm is recognized as a world leader in theoretical astrophysics and is known as a leading authority on the big-bang model of the universe. His work has merged the fields of particle physics, nuclear physics and astrophysics in the study of the early universe. He is the author of more than 350 scientific research papers, and he has written or edited more than 10 books.

He received his S.B. in 1967 from MIT and his Ph.D. in 1971 from Caltech. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech and an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin before joining the Chicago faculty as Associate Professor in Astronomy & Astrophysics and the Enrico Fermi Institute in 1974. Schramm was named Professor in 1977 and Louis Block Professor in the Physical Sciences in 1982. He also holds positions in Physics and the Committee on the Conceptual Foundations of Science. In 1994, he received the University's Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching.

A member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1986, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994 and a foreign fellow of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1995. Schramm has served on the boards of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the Astrophysical Research Consortium and the Aspen Center for Physics, where he has been chairman since 1992. He is also chairman of the board on physics and astronomy of the National Research Council. He has served as a consultant to Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Aerospace Corporation and Hansen Planetarium.

In 1993, he was awarded the Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize from the American Physical Society "for his manifold contributions to nuclear astrophysics." He received the Helen B. Warner Prize from the American Astronomical Society in 1978 and has received numerous other awards and named lectureships.