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From: "Bialek, William" <WBialek@gc.cuny.edu> Subject: Opportunities at the CUNY Graduate Center Date: August 10, 2015 at 7:25:49 PM PDT To: Mike DeWeese <deweese@berkeley.edu>, Oskar Hallatschek <ohallats@berkeley.edu>, "dsrokhsar@lbl.gov" <dsrokhsar@lbl.gov>, "goster@nature.berkeley.edu" <goster@nature.berkeley.edu>, "pande@stanford.edu" <pande@stanford.edu>, "GECrooks@lbl.gov" <GECrooks@lbl.gov>, "SXDWC@SLAC.Stanford.Edu" <SXDWC@SLAC.Stanford.Edu>, "Daniel S. Fisher" <dsfisher@stanford.edu>, "kchuang@stanford.edu" <kchuang@stanford.edu>, Surya Ganguli <sganguli@stanford.edu>, "steven.altschuler@ucsf.edu" <steven.altschuler@ucsf.edu>, "haoli@genome.ucsf.edu" <haoli@genome.ucsf.edu>, "sali@salilab.org" <sali@salilab.org>, "leor.weinberger@gladstone.ucsf.edu" <leor.weinberger@gladstone.ucsf.edu>, "lani.wu@ucsf.edu" <lani.wu@ucsf.edu> Cc: "Balasubramanian, Vijay" <vbalasubramanian@gc.cuny.edu>
Dear colleagues,
As you may know, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York has launched an Initiative for the Theoretical Sciences. For the past several years, the efforts of ITS have included seminars, workshops, public lectures, and visiting faculty. I have had the pleasure of being involved in this from the start, as a visitor and adviser to the administration.
The time has now come to search systematically for permanent faculty.
The President of the Graduate Center is committed to growing ITS into a vibrant community of 8-10 permanent faculty exploring theoretical problems across a range of traditional disciplines. It is expected that there will be communal support for postdoctoral fellows and visitors, and the activities of ITS will continue to be supplemented by the involvement of faculty from the CUNY colleges. There are many steps involved making this work, but we need to start by recruiting an initial cluster of faculty.
We have decided that our first search will be for theorists interested in biological problems, whose methods and intellectual style are grounded in theoretical physics and applied mathematics. We take these definitions broadly, and emphasize that part of the job for the first group of faculty will be to help in the recruiting of others, who will share their intellectual style but certainly have interests in very different problems. While many institutions can offer to embed theorists into a large (and perhaps even overwhelming) community of experimental biologists, few can offer the opportunity to have theorizing about biological systems at the core of a larger theoretical effort.
The Graduate Center is not a place with a great tradition in the natural sciences. On the other hand, it is more nearly a tabula rasa, and offers an almost unique chance to build a community from the ground up, including space for novel educational programs. We have shown, I think, that we can attract world class visitors, and with a critical mass of faculty this should be even easier. And, of course, being in New York is just plain fun.
Just so you know, although I have no intention of leaving Princeton, I do plan to continue spending a fraction of my time at The Graduate Center. I have had a wonderful time really working at ITS, where discussions at the blackboard seem to come very easily, and I am committed to helping with the transition to a permanent community.
We would appreciate your bringing this opportunity to the attention of appropriate candidates. While the Graduate Center has a preference for making senior appointments, we will consider junior candidates as well.
Interested candidates can navigate the application procedure starting at the website cuny.jobs, and entering the Job ID “13244" under “What.” The nominal deadline is soon. Of course, you can also point me to people I should contact directly.
With best wishes,
Bill
William Bialek Visiting Presidential Professor of Physics The Graduate Center, City University of New York John Archibald Wheeler/Battelle Professor in Physics, and Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics Princeton University
-- Andrej Sali, Ph.D. Professor, Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences University of California, San Francisco UCSF MC 2552 Byers Hall Room 503B 1700 4th Street San Francisco, CA 94143, USA Tel +1 (415) 514-4227; Fax +1 (415) 514-4231 Administrative Assistant: assistant@salilab.org, Tel +1 (415) 514-4228 Email sali@salilab.org; Web http://salilab.org