Dear UT community,

Dan Jaffe has let me know that he will step down from his role as Vice President for Research in August of 2025. At that point, he will have served for almost 10 years, longer than almost any current VPR in the Association of American Universities.

I want to thank Dan for his highly impactful leadership of UT research and his many contributions to our University. He has strong values, deeply understands the importance of research, is creative and willing to take risks. Moreover, he has served as a trusted adviser and a valued friend, and I greatly appreciate all he has done to advance our mission.

Dan’s most notable accomplishment since taking on the role of VPR in January 2016 has been cultivating a culture of scholarship and cross-disciplinary research that has enabled our community of more than 6,000 principal investigators (PIs) to nearly double their research expenditures from $600 million in 2014-2015 to $1.04 billion in 2022-2023. Three of the research units in Dan’s portfolio — the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, the Texas Advanced Computing Center, and the Applied Research Laboratories — account for a substantial portion of this growth, increasing from $149 million to $277 million during the same period.

Dan also founded our institutional Research Development unit, which engages more than half of all research-active PIs on campus each year to position them for success in securing high-prestige, team-based major research funding. The RD team has developed nearly $300 million of funded federal center grants and infrastructure grants during the past eight years. This list includes some of the most recognizable research centers on our campus today, including the National Science Foundation’s Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning, the National Institutes of Health’s Center on Aging and Population Sciences, the Department of Energy’s Southeast Texas Urban Integrated Field Laboratory, and the Center for Dynamics and Control of Materials (an NSF MRSEC). Dan and his team have been a major force in building interdisciplinarity across the campus, launching new initiatives including the 300-plus faculty member network of the Bridging Barriers research grand challenges and the Associate Professor Experimental (APX) retreat, and co-funding of arts and humanities seed programs with the College of Liberal Arts and College of Fine Arts. They have also stewarded key external research relationships with the City of Austin and MD Anderson Cancer Center, along with national laboratories.

Dan served as interim provost from May 2020 to August 2021, through the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic. He played a critical role with his measured and calm approach to the many decisions we needed to make during that time about instruction, research, and campus safety.

As VPR, Dan has been our go-to representative to federal funding agencies and has worked closely with Department of Defense, National Institutes of Health, and National Science Foundation to address policy and grant issues that affect our PIs.

Dan has also been a huge contributor to our promotion and tenure process through his position on the President’s Committee. I am continually struck by his ability to help think about excellence in research across the entire breadth of this incredible campus.

One of the ways Dan has been able to maintain his credibility with the research community during his time as VPR has been by maintaining his own research program. With funding from NASA, NSF, and private foundations, Dan’s instruments have served on satellites, airborne telescopes, and mountain tops to observe planets around other stars and other interesting phenomena. I know he looks forward to starting new observational and instrumentation projects during the coming years.

Please join me in thanking Dan for his outstanding leadership and profound impact on the work of this University.

Sincerely yours,
Jay