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Administrative Biography: Overview

Thomas F. George was appointed as the 7th chancellor of the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL) in 2003.  He has helped refine and articulate the special urban role of this campus as part of the University of Missouri land-grant system.  As the only public research university in the greater St. Louis region, UMSL provides access to a top-quality education at an affordable price, and as such, is the largest provider of the workforce for the region.  In concert with the campus community and external constituencies, the chancellor has led the development of a comprehensive action plan with well-defined priorities and goals which reinforce the university's role as a key driver of the cultural, social and economic well-being of the region.  The campus boasts one of the most diverse student bodies in the state with respect to ethnicities and backgrounds.  With both day and evening programs, the campus serves both commuter and residential students with an average age over 27, many of whom are working part-time or full-time and raising families.  Without the presence of UMSL in the St. Louis region, many students would not have access to baccalaureate, master's or doctoral degree programs.

Founded in only 1963, where the programs and facilities are growing rapidly, UMSL is continually venturing into exciting, new areas.  One example is the construction of the headquarters for Express Scripts, Inc. (ESI) as the first anchor for the university's new Business, Technology and Research Park located on the campus.  As a Fortune 150 company with annual sales of $18 billion, ESI is partnering with the campus in a wide variety of ways involving faculty and students.  Their presence on campus is part of a greater effort on the part of UMSL to become a leader in the St. Louis region for fostering businesses using information technology and their partnerships with the university.  The notion of partnerships extends to many other venues, such as cooperative degree programs with institutions overseas and building a new campus with St. Louis Community College.  These partnerships are laminated on a host of outstanding academic programs on campus as driven by a world-class faculty. This is evidenced by a number of high national rankings and substantial increased external support from federal grants/contracts.  In preparation for a comprehensive capital campaign (the first in the university's history), the annual level of private fund-raising has doubled in the past several years with the help of a number of gifts of $1 million or more and increased support from the alumni.

From 1996 to 2003 he served as the 12th chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point (UWSP). Known on campus at UWSP as the "students' chancellor," Dr. George was highly engaged with students, faculty and staff, and provided ready accessibility to constituents both on and off campus. Believing that premier, primarily undergraduate teaching institutions like UWSP are "ahead of the curve" nationally in readiness to meet student needs in upcoming decades, the chancellor, in collaboration with faculty governance, committed UWSP to achieving a leadership position among public, comprehensive universities. To accomplish this, the institution embraced two themes/pathways to guide the university: student-centered excellence and partnerships (both external and internal).

Partnerships, which rely in part on online and distance education and support student-centered excellence, were a focal point of Chancellor George's plan for leadership at UWSP, where the Central Wisconsin Idea (CWI) was developed as a blueprint for partnerships in the region and state. The CWI embraced the fundamental concept of the Wisconsin Idea, which focused on the University of Wisconsin as a servant to the state, thereby strengthening the local and state economy. Efforts under the CWI included the following: expanded distance education opportunities within the Collaborative Degree Program, which offered UWSP degrees off-campus at central and northern Wisconsin sites; a collaboration between Mid-State Technical College and UWSP to provide instruction and training to employees of Stora Enso North America, a major international paper products manufacturer; the New Economy Workforce (NEW) Coalition, which was a program for degree and certificate completion in collaboration with businesses and other educational institutions in the Wausau, Wisconsin area; and the Wisconsin Learning Center (WLC), which was an off-campus classroom site equipped with distance-education technology as well as a computer laboratory through which students can enroll in courses offered by UWSP and Mid-State Technical College. In each case, partnerships with the state and federal governments, businesses (e.g., Marathon County businesses for the NEW Coalition and the Portage County Business Council for the WLC) and with education institutions such as the two-year UW Colleges and Wisconsin technical colleges were the key to success in these initiatives.

To further advance the institution along the above pathways, Chancellor George worked with the UWSP Foundation, external community, university leadership and four colleges to make major strides in raising the level of private support. This included a number of gifts of $1 million or more.

He has had extensive civic engagement in the St. Louis region.  This includes his role as chair of Learning for Life, the largest component of the Greater St. Louis Area Boy Scout Council, serving 30,000 youth (half of the total number served by the council).  He also is a member of the council's Executive Board.  The chancellor is an Eagle Scout with the bronze, gold and silver palms (he has earned 62 merit badges), and in 2002 he earned the rank of Brotherhood in the Order of the Arrow, forty years after his induction.  He serves on the Board of Directors for the United Way of Greater St. Louis and was the chair of the Education Division for the 2005 & 2006 campaigns.  He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Regional Chamber and Growth Association (RCGA) and also serves as the chair of the RCGA Plant and Life Science Network.  He is on the Board of Directors of the Hiigher Education Consortium of Metropolitan St. Louis, serving as the Secretary/Treasurer.  He is an active member of various other boards:  Missouri Botanical Garden, CORTEX (Center of Research, Technology and Entrepreneurial Expertise), Civic Progress, Coalition for Plant and Life Sciences, Center for Emerging Technologies, St. Louis Mercantile Library, Christian Hospital, John W. Barriger III National Railroad Library, YMCA of Greater St. Louis, St. Louis Science Center, Academy of Science of St. Louis, St. Louis Coalition for Information Technology, and Innovate St. Louis.  He also serves on the advisory boards for the St. Louis Center of Excellence (Life Sciences) and IT Enterprises.

In Stevens Point, Wisconsin, under his leadership in 1999 as chair of the United Way of Portage County (UWPC) Campaign , the annual level of giving increased by 6% to reach a record level of nearly $1.5 million (he also served as president of the UWPC Board of Directors for the year 2001). He was elected secretary/treasurer (2002) and then vice-president (2002-03) of the Stevens Point YMCA Board of Directors, and in 2003 he served as co-chair of the YMCA's Strong Kids Campaign which raised a record of $122,000. In 2002, Dr. George was elected to a two-year term as president of the Wisconsin Samoset Council of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA); on a special note, the National BSA Camping Report for 2002 ranked the Samoset Cub Scout camp (Akela’s World) number 1 and the Boy Scout camp (Tesomas) number 3 out of 315 Scout councils in the nation. In 2003 he chaired the American Heart Walk for Portage and South Wood Counties, raising a record of $75,000.

In addition to his role as campus and community leader and fund-raiser, Tom George is a professor of chemistry and physics and active researcher-scholar in the derivation of theories and development of numerical techniques on computers to describe chemical, physical and optical phenomena, especially laser-induced processes involving materials such as microscopic surfaces and molecular clusters. His publications include 685 articles/chapters, 5 authored books, 15 edited books/volumes and 205 conference abstracts (lists of selected publications can be found in his faculty Web curriculum vitae).  He has served on a variety of editorial boards and currently is one of the two editors of the International Journal of Theoretical Physics, Group Theory and Nonlinear Optics.  He has delivered numerous invited lectures on his scientific research and on higher education at international conferences, held lectureships at universities, and presented seminars/colloquia at various institutions and laboratories on science and higher education (370 overall). He maintains active collaborations with scientists around the world and holds the title of Visiting Professor of Physics at Korea University in Seoul.

His research, including innovations in teaching, has been funded for 35 years from a wide variety of federal agencies and private foundations. The four most recent grants are: (1) $270,000 in 2004-07 from the Army Research Office with scientists from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory and Indiana State University to study diamond-like and self-assembling organic nanostructures; (2) $100,000 in 2003-04 from the National Science Foundation with scientists from UWSP, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and Indiana State University to develop a sophomore-level course in nanotechnology; (3) $13,000 in 2003-06 from the National Science Foundation with scientists at UWSP and the University of Szeged in Hungary for studies of ultrafast phase changes in semiconductors; and (4) $20,000 in 2007-08 from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization with scientists from West University of Timisoara in Romania for studies of rapid-detection sensors.

His scientific achievements have garnered prestigious awards such as the Marlow Medal and Prize from the Royal Society of Chemistry in Great Britain and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Sloan and Dreyfus Foundations, and he has also been named a fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences, American Physical Society, Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers and American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has served on the editorial boards of six different scientific journals and is currently one of the two editors of the International Journal of Theoretical Physics, Group Theory, and Nonlinear Optics. In 2004, he was elected as a foreign member of the Korean Academy of Science and Technology.

Dr. George has served as chair of the Physical Division of the American Chemical Society and chair of the Northwest Academic Forum of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. He has been a commissioner on the Midwestern Higher Education Compact for both Wisconsin and Missouri, and in connection with this he was on the Founding Board of Directors of the Distributed Learning Workshop and has served as chair of the Policy Research Advisory Committee. Dr. George served on the Council of State Representatives in the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. He was a member of the National Collegiate Athletic Association Division III Budget Committee. He was the chair of the St. Louis Local Committee for the 2006 American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting held in the city. He has organized various international conferences and served on many review panels for universities (such as accreditation), funding agencies and other organizations.

Having studied with faculty at the Berklee School of Music in Boston and the Eastman School of Music in Rochester (New York) and having performed extensively in a variety of public settings, the chancellor is an accomplished jazz pianist. He performs as a soloist and with combos/ensembles (including singers) and bands in the region and throughout the state, especially in connection with university events.  He has also performed recently at the University of Arkansas, Nanjing University in China, and the city of Szeged in Hungary.  In a duo with a trumpeter/flügelhornist in 1995, he recorded a compact disc entitled Close Your Eyes: Women Jazz Composers under the Hester Park label.  In 2007, he recorded a compact disc entitled Chancellor Tom George and Friends Present "Love from St. Louis by the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Born in 1947 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Tom George received his high school diploma in 1963 from Friends' Central School, where he earned varsity letters in soccer and wrestling; he received the Distinguished Alumni Award in 2003. He completed his B.A. degree (Phi Beta Kappa) in 1967 with a double major in chemistry (with honors) and mathematics (with honors) from Gettysburg College, which gave him the Distinguished Alumni Award in 1987. He earned his M.S. degree in 1968 and Ph.D. degree in 1970 in theoretical chemistry from Yale University, followed by postdoctoral appointments at MIT and the University of California at Berkeley. In 1972 he joined the faculty at the University of Rochester where, by age 29, he attained the rank of full professor of chemistry. In 1985 he moved to the State University of New York at Buffalo as dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics for six years. Prior to coming to UWSP in 1996, he served five years as provost and academic vice president of Washington State University.

He has been married since 1970 to Dr. Barbara Harbach, who is professor of music at the University of Missouri-St. Louis (formerly associate professor of mathematics and computing at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and professor of music at Washington State University). She is a harpsichordist, organist, recording artist and composer, and she is also a co-editor of Women of Note Quarterly and co-owner of Vivace Press. She has the following degrees: B.A., Pennsylvania State University; M.M.A., Yale University; D.M.A., Eastman School of Music; konzertdiplom, Musikhochschule, Frankfurt, Germany; honorary doctorate in music (honoris causa), Wilmington College, Ohio.

Throughout his history as teacher-scholar-administrator, Thomas George has maintained a commitment to the ideals and goals of higher education and to creating a campus learning environment that prepares students for productive professional lives well into the 21st century. This has been demonstrated through priorities set in his administrative appointments at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, Washington State University and the State University of New York at Buffalo, and in his original faculty appointment at the University of Rochester.