Robert Shelton President University of Arizona Thursday, Feb. 22 3 p.m. Ashurst Auditorium

U of A President Shelton supports increasing university collaborations

University of Arizona President Robert Shelton will be on campus Feb. 22 for a discussion with the NAU community on the need for increased collaboration between institutions of higher education.

Shelton is the third guest in President Haeger's 2006-07 Speakers Series. His presentation, "Higher Education in Arizona: the Power of Collaborations to Benefit Arizonans," will begin at 3 p.m. in Ashurst Auditorium. A reception will follow.

The presentation will be webstreamed live at www.tv.nau.edu/president/.

Shelton will point to existing collaborations between the University of Arizona and Northern Arizona University—such as the Native American Cancer Research Partnership, and collaborative research on water issues via the Arizona Water Institute—as examples of how such partnerships are not only possible, but necessary.

"Interdisciplinary research and collaboration are increasingly common within universities," Shelton said, citing the U of A's BIO5 Institute as an example, so named because it combines faculties of five disciplines: engineering, medicine, pharmacy, life sciences and physical sciences.

"In an era of increasingly scarce resources to tackle increasingly complex problems, universities that thrive do so by forming inter-university collaborations."

Shelton became the 19th U of A president in July. He came from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he was executive vice chancellor and provost for five years.

He has been active on external boards and councils, including the Space Telescope Institute Council that advises and provides oversight and advocacy to NASA for the Hubble Space Telescope; the board of trustees of the North Carolina School of Science & Mathematics; and the board of trustees and executive committee of Research Triangle Institute, an organization with a distinguished history in scientific research and technology development.

Shelton served as a guest scientist at Kernforschungsanlage in Julich, Germany, and at the National Institute for Materials Science in Tokyo. He has held a visiting professorship at the Universite de Geneve in Geneva, and served as editor of the Journal of Physics and Chemistry of Solids. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the California Council on Science and Technology and a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

To wrap up the President's Speakers Series in April, NAU President John Haeger will take a collective look at issues addressed by his guests to identify the implications they may have on NAU.

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