Appointment of Chair for Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics
Dear Colleagues:
I am pleased to announce that Stavros Lomvardas, PhD, will serve as the next chair of the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics and first in this role to carry the title P. Roy Vagelos Chair of the department. Dr. Lomvardas is the Columbia University Florence and Herbert Irving Professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics and a principal investigator at the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain and Behavior Institute. His appointment as department chair is effective January 1, 2023.
Dr. Lomvardas’s research program is focused on the genomic mechanisms of olfactory receptor gene choice and the elucidation of the molecular principles of genome organization in health and disease. His accomplishments have been recognized by numerous honors and awards, including the Vilcek Prize on Creative Promise, the Young Investigator Award for Research in Olfaction, the New Innovator Award, the McKnight Scholar Award, and the HHMI Faculty Scholar Award.
Stavros received his PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics from Columbia and remained here for his postdoctoral studies as a Helen Hay Whitney Fellow in Dr. Richard Axel’s laboratory; there he discovered a novel mechanism of gene regulation through interchromosomal genomic interactions. He started his independent research career at University of California San Francisco and was recruited back to Columbia as a full professor in 2014 by Tom Maniatis, PhD, one of his scientific heroes and mentors.
Home to three Nobel Laureates, several members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and of Medicine, and several HHMI Investigators, the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics is renowned for its discovery of new scientific knowledge and its international leadership. That we are able to appoint Stavros as chair, a homegrown talent who completed his doctoral degree in this very department 20 years ago, is appropriate and fitting, and a source of pride for all involved. It is my hope that Stavros’s deep intellectual ties to the science at CUIMC and the Zuckerman Institute will be a bellwether for removing barriers separating disciplines, departments, and centers across CUIMC and for creating a more integrated research enterprise across our campuses.
I would like to thank Art Palmer, PhD, for serving as interim chair since the completion of Dr. Maniatis’s exemplary nine-year chairmanship in 2018. In his second stint in this role, Art not only ably led the department through the pandemic, he succeeded in bringing on board four outstanding faculty members and diversifying the ranks of the department. Special recognition and gratitude also belong to Laura Landweber, PhD, who facilitated these recruitment efforts and supported key departmental functions while serving as vice chair.
No accounting of the department’s leadership would be complete without recognition of P. Roy Vagelos, MD, our singular benefactor whose generous funding in 2017 of the Precision Medicine Initiative and the Roy and Diana Vagelos Basic Science Research Fund has made possible several critical faculty recruitments in the department, the purchase of equipment, such as major expansion of our cryo-EM imaging facilities, and the overall strengthening of the department’s research infrastructure. A pioneer in targeted molecular approaches to drug discovery, Dr. Vagelos has been a mentor and advisor to many department faculty members, including Dr. Lomvardas, the first Vagelos Chair.
I also must recognize and thank the faculty co-chairs of the search committee, Emmanuelle Passegué, PhD, and Rodney J. Rothstein, PhD, and their fellow committee members, who generously contributed their time and valued judgment to the search process.
We owe a debt of gratitude to each of these leaders and many others for bringing the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics to the place it occupies today, and we look forward to a bright future informed by Dr. Lomvardas’s energy, creativity, and commitment. Please join me in congratulating Stavros and wishing him well in his new role as chair.
All my best,
Katrina Armstrong, MD
Dean of the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons
Executive Vice President for Health and Biomedical Sciences, Columbia University