John B. Simpson (G72, 73)
President, University at Buffalo

John B. Simpson spent 23 years as a faculty member at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he served as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from 1994 to 1998. He moved on to become campus provost and executive vice chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and then arrived as president of the University at Buffalo, the flagship institution of the State University of New York system, in 2004.

Simpson's years at Northwestern, where he received a master's and doctorate in neurobiology and behavior, prepared him for the early stages of his career. Had anyone asked him whether he wanted to be a university president someday, "I would have found it very entertaining and utterly alien as a concept of what I wanted to do for the rest of my life," he says. "I went to Northwestern for the remarkable advantages I got in my training as a scientist."

At Washington, Simpson taught classes and ran a laboratory; he recalls it as "a terrific place to work for somebody interested in biomedical science." During his years at Santa Cruz, the university grew nearly 50 percent in five years thanks to the tech boom, and Simpson helped to create a new engineering college with an information technology focus.

During his first three years in Buffalo, Simpson has led a major strategic planning process that will guide the university for the next 15 years — everything from academic direction to staffing support services, such as human resources, to planning for a disaster.

"A huge portion of the campus participated in this understanding of where we are and where we want to go," he says. "I pushed the conversation and framed it."