| 562 Capen Hall |
| Office of the Provost |
| E-mail: capaldi@buffalo.edu |
The Position
At UB, the provost is second in command only to the university president, serving as the president's liaison to the university's deans and faculty. The provost's primary duties involve academic and budgetary affairs, as well as providing leadership in a number of areas, including faculty concerns, academic programs, research and scholarship, and student academic life and learning. UB's 13 deans all report directly to the provost.
Together with the president, the provost sets overall policy for UB and, with the senior vice president, determines how to allocate university funds. In the absence of the president, the provost serves in his or her place.
Dr. Elizabeth Capaldi was born in New York City and received her bachelor's degree from the University of Rochester before moving to the University of Texas at Austin, where she earned a Ph.D. in experimental psychology.
Capaldi served as a faculty member at Purdue University from 1969 to 1988, as head of the department of psychological sciences from 1983 to 1988 and as assistant dean of Purdue's graduate school from 1982 to 1986. She then moved to the University of Florida, where she was special assistant to the president for the Florida Quality Evaluation Project from 1991 to 1996, director of institutional research from 1994 to 1996 and provost from July 1996 to November 1999.
She was appointed provost and professor of psychology at UB in July 2000. Since her appointment, Capaldi's highest-profile acts include the erasure of the College of Arts and Science debt and the resultant lift of the college's hiring freeze.
Capaldi's focus in psychology is eating behaviors and the motivations behind them. She is the author of a psychology textbook, the editor of two others, and a contributor to over 60 other publications.
She is past president of the American Psychological Society (2000-2001), and has been elected a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has also served as president of the Midwestern Psychological Association.
