NYU Ecosystem Hub Talk: Dr. Walter Massey, President of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Speaker
Dr. Walter Massey
President of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Former Chairman of the Bank of America
The talk will be moderated by Juan de Pablo, Executive Vice President for Global Science & Technology at NYU and Executive Dean of NYU Tandon.
Bio
Walter E. Massey is a Trustee Emeritus of the Marine Biological Laboratory, a Trustee Emeritus of the University of Chicago, and a senior advisor to the President of the University of Chicago.
Walter Massey is an American educator, physicist, and business executive. He currently serves as senior advisor to the president of the University of Chicago, chairman of the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization, and chair the board of trustees of the City Colleges of Chicago. He is President Emeritus of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and former chair of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design. He is also President Emeritus of Morehouse College (1995-2007), where the Walter E. Massey Leadership Center has been named in his honor, former Director of the National Science Foundation (1991-1993), and former Director of Argonne National Laboratory.
He has served in professorial and administrative posts at the University of California (senior provost), University of Chicago (vice president for research, professor of physics), Brown University (dean of the College and professor of physics), and the University of Illinois (assistant professor of physics). He has served on numerous corporate boards of global companies including Bank of America, Delta, BP Oil, McDonald’s, and Motorola. He served as president and chairman of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the first African American to hold the position. He was vice president-elect of the American Physical Society, chair of the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board (SEAB), and a member of the President's Council of Advisors of Science and Technology (PCAST) in two presidential administrations. Walter Massey has also served as a member of the National Science Board and on the Board of Trustees of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
Walter Massey has served on the boards of numerous philanthropic organizations and foundations in the civic, social, cultural, and educational spaces, including the Mellon Foundation, the Commonwealth Fund, the MacArthur Foundation,, the Rand Corporation, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, and many others.
Dr. Massey's service to the scientific community extends beyond domestic borders and is global in scope. He has served on the National Science Foundation's Advisory Committee for International Programs, was a member of the President's Advisory Board for the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, co-chaired the planning efforts on cooperative programs between the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the AAAS, co-chaired the AAAS project to strengthen Scientific and Technical Engineering Infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa, and was a founding member of the African Academy of Sciences, an organization designed to promote the advancement of scientific research and science education in sub-Saharan Africa. Walter Massey was also founding co-chairman of the National Society of Black Physicists, an organization established to promote the professional development of black physicists and enhance the number of African Americans entering the field of physics, and an advisor for the formation of the Society of Black Physics Graduate Students.
Dr. Massey graduated from Morehouse College with a BS in Mathematics and Physics (1958) on a fellowship from the Ford Foundation and received his PhD in Physics from Washington University (1966). While finishing his doctoral studies, Dr. Massey began working in 1966 as a member of the research staff at Argonne National Laboratory.
Walter Massey has notably been the recipient of more than 40 honorary degrees from institutions that include Harvard ,Yale, Brown, Amherst, and Ohio State University, and received the National Science Foundation’s Vannevar Bush Award in 2019. He received both the Enrico Fermi Award for Science and Technology from the Chicago Historical Society and the Public Humanities Award from Illinois Humanities. In 2020 he was the recipient of the Gold Key Award from the Sigma Xi Research Society.
Two overarching principles have inspired Walter’s groundbreaking career: that science and technology are necessary to sustain the nation’s quality of life and the standard of living of its citizens; and that the general public’s understanding of science and technology is a critical component of a democratic society. Guided by these principles, Massey has worked for more than half a century to strengthen research capacity and science education in the United States and to increase the representation of minorities and women in science and technology.
