Following the departure of Harvey Stenger, Dr. Bruce McCombe has agreed to fill the position of interim provost.
For an estimated six months, McCombe will be taking on the responsibilities of the interim provost, such as setting goals for and overseeing all academic activity at the university.
"There's always a learning process when you walk into a new job," McCombe said. "You need to work yourself into whatever kinds of projects are going on."
Administrative positions are nothing new to McCombe. Since his arrival to UB in 1982, he has served the university not only as an associate professor of physics, but also as dean of the Graduate School, and most recently, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS).
"If you're a physicist, you solve problems," McCombe said. "There are problems you can solve in the lab or on the computer, but being an administrator at that level, you deal with a bunch of problems. I never knew what was going to happen when I came to work. If you view that it is your job to help solve problems, then it is really rewarding."
McCombe was born in the small town of Sanford, Maine and attended Bowdoin College before going on to earn his Ph.D. in solid-state physics from Brown University in 1966.
After obtaining his doctorate, McCombe went on to accept a position at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. There, he occupied various positions until he became the superintendent of the Electronics Technology Division in 1979. He spent two years in this position before accepting a professorship at UB.
McCombe is an internationally known scholar, and he focuses his research in basic physics, applications of semiconductor nanostructures, and spin effects in semiconductors. He has authored and co-authored more than 220 articles as a fellow of the American Physical Society.
McCombe also likes to play basketball to get away from the science world, despite his growing age.
Apart from serving as dean of the Graduate School and dean of CAS, McCombe has served as associate chair and chair of the physics department, co-director of the Center for Electronic and Electro-Optic Materials, and vice provost for graduate education, among other positions.
After five years in CAS, McCombe stepped down on July 1, 2011. The college teaches about 80 percent of all credit hours of all freshmen and deals with two-thirds of all undergraduate students; CAS is unavoidable at this university, according to McCombe.
Over the course of seven years, CAS hired over 300 faculty members – including younger faculty members and many more women – to add to the strength and diversity of the college's faculty, according to McCombe. He attributes this success to UB2020.
"It was a very good vision for the university," McCombe said. "It's not dead, it's still there. What got accomplished was a lot of very good faculty hires. That was very rewarding to me – to be able to work and really help provide ways of hiring more people and bringing the best possible people in here that we could."
As of July 1, 2011, Dr. Bruce Pitman was named the new dean of CAS. McCombe had nothing but words of praise toward his colleague.
"He really knows the university and understands that job extremely well," McCombe said. "He is very well motivated about what he does."
Recently, McCombe has met with Harvey Stenger to get up to speed on his new position. When questioned about why Stenger's office was unable to arrange an interview with The Spectrum last week, McCombe responded that he never known his colleague to act in such a manner.
"I don't know exactly what happened there," McCombe said. "Harvey is an outgoing person. He is not the sort of person that would ignore [students]. He is very student-oriented. He's been teaching as a dean every single year that he's been here. He's very much engaged. It doesn't sound like him. I know him."
Currently McCombe is on sabbatical, but was chosen singlehandedly by President Satish K. Tripathi to replace Stenger. The two men have a very good relationship filled with mutual respect, according to McCombe.
"[Tripathi] and I are very different people," McCombe said. "I tend to be very loud and brash. I say things that are on my mind. He is a very careful person. He always thinks before he speaks. We get along, or he wouldn't have asked me to take the job. I will do my best to move his vision of the university forward in the next six months. There is so much change [at UB]. Everywhere you turn there is somebody new."
The university's search for its next provost will be concluded by the summer of 2012.
Email: news@ubspectrum.com
