Dear Colleagues,

I am pleased to share that Axel Drees, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy, will serve as interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Drees will serve in this position while we prepare for a search to replace outgoing Dean Nicole Sampson.

The Provost’s Office received a significant amount of feedback from the community on suggestions for the interim dean replacement. I also engaged in several conversations with key stakeholders in selecting an interim dean to lead CAS. It is apparent that the faculty and staff who make up the CAS community are vested in the success of the College, and I appreciate how many of you reached out to share input.

Dr. Drees has served in a variety of leadership roles at Stony Book. These include Associate Dean for Budget and Operations of CAS from 2008 to 2012, during which time he also served as Acting Dean of CAS in the summer of 2011. He has also held roles as Vice Provost for Budget and Strategic Planning and as chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Since 2018, Dr. Drees has been a member of the University Senate and has chaired the Committee for Academic Planning and Resource Allocation (CAPRA).

Dr. Drees received his PhD from Heidelberg University in 1989 for pioneering work on experiments seeking to create the quark gluon plasma (QGP), which is a state of hot and dense nuclear matter in which proton and neutrons melt into their substructure and which was the primary form of matter in the universe for the first 10^-6 seconds. He continued his research as postdoc and Assistant Professor at Heidelberg before he joined the faculty at Stony Brook University in January 1998. At Stony Brook he and his group played a leading role in the PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. His work contributed to the discovery that QGP can indeed be formed in the laboratory. Dr. Drees and his group now focus on characterizing the properties of the QGP using the PHENIX experiment and in the future the new state of the art sPHENIX experiment, which started data taking in 2023. 

Dr. Drees has held many leadership roles in PHENIX and currently serves as deputy spokesperson of the collaboration. Since he joined Stony Brook, the research of his group has been funded by more than $23 million through the Department of Energy (DOE). Over his career he has published more than 300 papers, which have been cited more than 30,000 times, resulting in an h-index of over 100.

I look forward to working with Dr. Drees in this capacity. He will begin to work with the CAS Dean’s Office in July on transition plans with an official start on Aug. 1. Additionally, we will be launching a full national search process for the CAS Dean role at the start of the next academic year and we will be actively recruiting strong internal and external candidates to apply for this position.

Sincerely,
Carl

Carl Lejuez
Provost and Executive Vice President