Johns Hopkins University has selected accomplished higher education administrator Nick Wigginton to serve as associate vice provost for research to oversee several of the university's nationally-recognized research initiatives, including the Bloomberg Distinguished Professorships (BDP) program. He will assume this role on July 8.
Image caption: Nick Wigginton
In addition to overseeing the BDP program, Wigginton will lead the Research Development Team, internal research funding awards programs, research communications, and research data and analytics. He will also help develop future research initiatives.
"Nick's experiences and values directly align with the priorities of the research enterprise at Johns Hopkins, and we look forward to the continued evolution of our programs to best serve our research community under his leadership," says Denis Wirtz, vice provost for research.
Wigginton joins Johns Hopkins from the University of Michigan, where he most recently served as its associate vice president for research–strategic initiatives. In that role, he developed and implemented programs and policies, and built new teams to increase the research competitiveness of Michigan's research enterprise. Wigginton also spent the 2019-2020 academic year at Stanford University working closely with its research office as part of the prestigious American Council of Education Fellows Program.
In discussing his decision to come to Johns Hopkins, Wigginton says he looks forward to building upon the strengths of the Johns Hopkins research community, and to being part of the BDP program, which is the largest program of its kind in the nation.
"It's incredibly inspiring to be joining the nation's first research university," Wigginton says. "Johns Hopkins has a stellar reputation for discovery and impact. This feels like a place where I can learn a lot, and I'm eager to build new initiatives and support existing ones such as the BDP program. It's a crown jewel in terms of faculty recruitment programs, and I am extremely excited to be able to help foster an environment where the world's most accomplished scholars come together to tackle society's most pressing challenges."
Wigginton graduated with a bachelor's degree in geology from Michigan State University and received a PhD in geosciences from Virginia Tech. He was a postdoctoral scholar at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland and a visiting researcher at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington. Before joining Michigan, Wigginton was a senior editor at Science, where he oversaw the selection and publication of manuscripts across a wide range of scientific disciplines.
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