October 16, 2003

Morimoto to step down as Graduate School dean

Provost hails his ability ‘to implement a number of initiatives to strengthen graduate education’

Richard Morimoto

Richard Morimoto has announced plans to step down as associate provost and dean of The Graduate School at the end of this academic year to return to full-time research and teaching in the department of biochemistry, molecular biology and cell biology.

“During six years in these positions, he has worked effectively with students, staff, faculty and administrators to implement a number of initiatives to strengthen graduate education at Northwestern,” said Provost Lawrence B. Dumas.

“President Bienen and I are deeply grateful to Dean Morimoto for the imagination and energy he has brought to improving and enriching the enterprise of graduate education at Northwestern.”

Dumas said he will seek the assistance of the Administrative Board of The Graduate School and the General Faculty Committee to establish a search committee to help identity a successor. “Because President Bienen and I believe that there are special advantages to having this important position filled by a person familiar with Northwestern, the search will initially be an internal one,” he said.

In his commitment to increasing the quality and competitiveness of matriculants in the University’s doctoral and MFA programs, Morimoto introduced uniform financial support for all doctoral students. He also worked with academic units to establish “recruitment weekend” programs to enable outstanding applicants to visit Northwestern and enjoy first-hand exposure to the diverse and complementary strengths of disciplinary clusters in the humanities and social sciences. Begun in 1999, this program is now held on six weekends, including more than a dozen disciplines and hosting some 140 prospective graduate students.

Partly as a result of such initiatives, admission to doctoral programs has become increasingly competitive, and increasing percentages of those offered admission have accepted those offers. Among the 8,800 applicants for the current entering class, for example, only 16 percent were admitted. Of those admitted, some 40 percent enrolled.

Renewing The Graduate School’s commitment to increase the enrollment of underrepresented minority students, Morimoto established discipline-wide faculty minority recruitment committees in the life and biomedical sciences, humanities and engineering, Dumas said. During his tenure, the enrollment of minority graduate students increased by 30 percent.

Morimoto also spearheaded the establishment of new programs for Northwestern’s diverse population of international students, including the Inter-national Summer Institute, which provides comprehensive training in oral and written communication and cultural immersion courses for new students. Such initiatives — together with faculty efforts to re-examine departmental and interdisciplinary programs with an emphasis on the quality of mentoring, training, career guidance and placement — place Northwestern’s graduate programs in a much stronger competitive position, nationally and worldwide.

More than 30 new fellowships have been established in The Graduate School during Campaign Northwestern. The new resources benefit each of the schools by permitting selective growth in student numbers to strengthen Northwestern’s best graduate programs, by allowing the development of new interdisciplinary programs, by increasing success in recruitment of minority students, and by enhancing the ability to be highly competitive for matching funds for graduate student training grants from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and other foundations and agencies.

Dumas said Morimoto also recognized the importance of recognizing the very best graduate students. The new Presidential Graduate Fellow initiative draws together a highly select group of distinguished students across all disciplines; this Fellowship now represents the highest internal honor for a Northwestern graduate student. The program began in 2002 with the appointment of eight Fellows. Additional Fellows are appointed each year, with the goal of maintaining a cohort of 12 to 15. Similarly, Commence-ment weekend has been expanded to include a Univer-sity-wide hooding convocation for doctoral and MFA recipients.

At the end of this academic year, Dean Morimoto will return to the department of biochemistry, molecular biology and cell biology, where he previously served as chair, to continue his activities as the John Evans Professor of Molecular Biology and director of the Rice Institute for Biomedical Research. He will continue his widely recognized research on the molecular biology of protein quality control and cellular stress responses. This research is of central importance to the understanding of diseases of protein conformation, including Huntington’s disease, ALS and Parkinson’s disease.

During his deanship Morimoto received a MERIT award from the National Institutes of Health, served on a study section of the National Institutes of Health, participated in review panels throughout the world, and was recognized as a visiting professor at the University of Rome, Peking University, Ecole Normale Superieur in Paris, and Kyoto University in Japan.