New York, NY - Pace University President Stephen J. Friedman has announced that Uday Sukhatme, Sc.D., Executive Vice Chancellor and Dean of the Faculties at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) and a distinguished physicist, will assume the role of provost of Pace, effective May 21, 2012.

“I am delighted that Uday Sukhatme is joining the talented Pace team in this very important position,” Friedman said. “He will lead significant further advancement of our academic programs and faculty development, with a strong focus on the special strengths of each college and school, which are key components of our strategic plan. His academic credentials, strong record of research, and proven success at large and complex academic institutions will be invaluable to our faculty and students.”

Sukhatme succeeds Harriet R. Feldman, PhD, RN, FAAN, a national leader in nursing who assumed the role of interim provost in August 2010. She will be returning to her post as Dean of Pace’s College of Health Professions. Said Friedman: “We deeply appreciate Harriet’s many contributions as interim provost and look forward to the continuation of her long and successful Pace career.”

“Pace is uniquely positioned with a major presence both in urban Manhattan and suburban Westchester,” Sukhatme said. “This offers rich opportunities for real-life educational experiences, while promoting excellence in research, creative activities, learning, and community engagement.  I see great progress and enormous potential at Pace, and look forward to joining an institution that is moving forward in excellence, stature and reputation.”

“Up and coming”
Sukhatme has served as the Executive Vice Chancellor and Dean of the Faculties, as well as Professor of Physics, at IUPUI since July 2006. His duties involve management of all academic issues and overseeing 21 campus deans and schools, including the schools of liberal arts and sciences, as well as professional schools ranging from law and medicine to business, nursing, education and art. Sukhatme was the driving force responsible for developing and implementing the IUPUI Academic Plan, whose major initiatives have led to transformative improvements by stimulating new revenue streams involving innovative enrollment strategies, improved student retention, increased interdisciplinary research and energetic fundraising. The striking outcomes of the strategic plan have played an important role in placing IUPUI at rank 3 on the 2011 U.S. News and World Report’s list of “up and coming” universities.

From 2002 to 2006, Sukhatme served as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the State University of New York at Buffalo, managing 30 academic departments, the Dean’s office, 480 full time tenured or tenure track faculty members, and 250 staff members. He helped to produce four successive years of strong faculty hiring, increasing tenured/tenure track faculty by 20 percent.

Before that, from 1980 to 2002, Sukhatme was at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) as Professor of Physics, Head of the Department of Physics from 1991 to 1998, Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs from 1998 to 2000, and Vice Provost for Academic Affairs from 2000 to 2002.

New mathematical identities
Sukhatme’s early research was in the phenomenology of multiparticle production data resulting from very high-energy collisions of fundamental particles at the world’s largest accelerators. He was a co-developer of the “dual parton model” for describing soft hadronic collisions. His subsequent research has focused on studying the consequences of supersymmetry as applied to quantum mechanics, a set of ideas that has stimulated new approaches and applications in many branches of physics like atomic, molecular, nuclear, statistical, and condensed matter physics. This research has led to a deeper understanding of known results and a wide variety of new discoveries. Recently, the application of supersymmetric quantum mechanics to periodic potentials has yielded exciting new cyclic mathematical identities for Jacobi elliptic functions.

Sukhatme’s research in the phenomenology of high-energy hadronic interactions and the consequences of supersymmetric quantum mechanics was funded continuously by grants from the U.S. Department of Energy for 23 years. Among his 180 publications are 13 that have been included in the top-cited category in citation databases, an indication of their impact in the discipline of physics. His advanced level book on “Supersymmetry in Quantum Mechanics” (2001), co-authored with Fred Cooper and Avinash Khare, has been favorably reviewed and extensively cited.

Sukhatme earned both his doctorate and bachelor’s degrees in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.Sc. Honors degree in Mathematics from the University of Delhi, India. He has been a regular participant in international high-energy physics conferences, has given talks on administrative accomplishments at many national meetings, and has received a number of community awards to recognize these achievements. He is fluent in five languages (English, Italian, Marathi, Hindi, and French).

For more information about Pace, visit www.pace.edu.