Joseph Francisco, the fourth of four finalists for the position of dean of UNL’s College of Arts and Sciences, will give a public presentation and have an open forum from 3:30-5:30 p.m. March 6 at the Lied Commons.

Administrators, faculty, students and staff are encouraged to attend the presentation and provide their thoughts via this webpage.

Francisco, the Moore distinguished professor of chemistry at Purdue University, was previously a research fellow at Cambridge University in England and a provost postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1991 he was a visiting associate in planetary science at the California Institute of Technology. In 2006 he was appointed as the William E. Moore Distinguished Professor of Earth and Atmospheric Science and Chemistry at Purdue, where he also spent time as associate dean for research in the College of Science.

Francisco has received an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation Teacher-Scholar Award. He received an American Association for the Advancement of Science Mentor Award and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, which he spent at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. He is a fellow of the American Chemical Society, American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. He also is a co-author of the textbook “Chemical Kinetics and Dynamics.”

Francisco completed his undergraduate studies in chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin and earned a doctorate in chemical physics at MIT.

On Feb. 18, the Office of the Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs announced four finalists for the position. In addition to Francisco, they are Barbara Risman of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Stephen Esquith of Michigan State University and Susan Sterett of the University of Denver.

For more on the Arts and Sciences dean search, click here.