Mary Sansalone, professor of structural engineering at Cornell University, has been named a vice provost, Provost Don M. Randel has announced.

Sansalone, a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, will join the provost's staff in June 1999, after a one-year leave of absence at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. The appointment is part of the administrative restructuring announced by Randel and President Hunter Rawlings last winter.

As vice provost Sansalone will help focus attention on strategic academic issues and opportunities and facilitate initiatives generated at the college, division, department and unit levels, Randel said.

"I am very pleased to announce that Mary Sansalone will be joining the central administration as a vice provost," Randel said. "She represents all of the best qualities of the Cornell faculty, for she has a distinguished and well-funded career in research, she is an extraordinarily accomplished teacher and adviser, and she is a committed citizen of the university and the larger community. In addition to working with the colleges and academic programs, she will focus her early efforts on undergraduate education and advising and on our upcoming Middle States accreditation."

The restructuring has realigned staffing in the Office of the Provost and was part of an effort to strengthen the academic mission of the university and streamline its central reporting structures.

In May, Rawlings and Randel announced the appointment of Nobel laureate Robert C. Richardson, the Floyd R. Newman Professor of Physics, as vice provost for research, and Cutberto Garza, M.D., professor and director of the Division of Nutritional Sciences, as vice provost. Those appointments were effective July 1.

Sansalone, Richardson and Garza are members of a new academic cabinet that is meets with Rawlings biweekly. That cabinet includes the provost, two college deans (currently Philip E. Lewis,

the Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and Daryl B. Lund, the Ronald P. Lynch Dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences), Walter I. Cohen, vice provost and dean of the Graduate School, Richardson, Garza and Sansalone.

"This group will ensure that the university's primary academic missions in instruction, research and public service remain consistently central to our thinking at the highest levels of the administration," Rawlings said in January.

Randel said Sansalone will work closely with Garza to stimulate projects that foster collaborative efforts in research and the sciences.

At Harvard, as a J.F. Kennedy Fellow, Sansalone will be studying under former Harvard President Derek Bok, earning a master's degree in public administration in an intense midcareer program at the Kennedy School and the Graduate School of Education. She said the course will serve her well in her new Cornell position, as it focuses on leadership of organizations, negotiation and policy issues related to higher education.

"One of my goals at Harvard is to learn leadership skills that are not easily acquired while earning a Ph.D. and focusing on a career in research and teaching," Sansalone said. "This includes organization, planning, budgeting and management of human and physical resources in colleges and universities."

Her research at Harvard will focus on the importance of strong leadership in American institutions. "I am interested not only in the role of leadership within universities, but also understanding how universities can educate young women and men to provide ethical and principled leadership for our country in the future," she said.

Sansalone has demonstrated a leadership role in spearheading an intensive planning effort to develop a blueprint for the future of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE). Perhaps her most prominent role, however, was in organizing the provost's instructive pumpkin competition earlier this year.

Sansalone earned her doctorate in structural engineering at Cornell in 1986 and, in 1988, joined the faculty as an assistant professor of structural engineering. She was named associate director of CEE in 1994 and again in 1996 and became professor of structural engineering in 1997. She has received numerous awards for her research, including a Presidential Young Investigator award from the National Science Foundation and the prestigious Wason Medal for Materials Research from the American Concrete Institute. In 1992 she was named the national Professor of the Year by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation. She was a Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell from 1993 to 1998. Her graduate students have won eight national awards for their research.