Professors Jon C. Clardy of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Jonathan D. Culler of the Departments of English and of Comparative Literature have been appointed senior associate deans for the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University. They will serve, with Dean Philip E. Lewis, as chief academic officers of the college and will share responsibilities formerly overseen by Biddy Martin, recently appointed university provost at Cornell.

"The faculty and students of Arts and Sciences will benefit enormously from the energy, efficiency and insight they will bring to the college administration," said Lewis of Clardy and Culler. "Both are exceptionally distinguished members of the faculty with international recognition for their research and scholarship. Both are also renowned for their excellence in teaching at the undergraduate as well as graduate levels."

Lewis added that Clardy and Culler each have a portfolio that includes departments and programs from all three of the college's major disciplinary areas -- the humanities and arts, the social sciences and the natural sciences.

Senior associate deans have administrative responsibility for the 28 departments and 16 programs within the College of Arts and Sciences and handle many of its relations to other parts of the university. Lewis said that, as members of an executive group that includes the dean and associate deans of the administration, "each acquires a comprehensive understanding of the whole college and the capacity to cover for one another as well as for the dean."

Culler and Clardy will divide duties among the departments and programs in the humanities, natural sciences and social sciences. Neither will cover a department with which he is affiliated.

Clardy is an organic chemist who earned a bachelor of science degree at Yale University in 1964 and a Ph.D. in organic chemistry at Harvard University in 1969. He taught at Iowa State University before coming to Cornell in 1978. From 1988 to 1993 he served as chair of the Department of Chemistry. In 1990 he was awarded an endowed chair as the Horace White Professor of Chemistry and also received the Clark Distinguished Teaching Award at Cornell. Clardy was made a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995, when he also received the Ernest Guenther Award in the Chemistry of Natural Products from the American Chemical Society (ACS). In 1997 the ACS named him the Arthur C. Pope Scholar. He has been named a fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Clardy works in the areas of anti-cancer and immunosuppressive drugs, genomic approaches to new natural products and the protein targets of natural products. His research is funded by grants from NIH, the Packard Foundation, the Burroughs-Wellcome Fund and from private industry.

Culler is a literary theorist who earned a bachelor of arts in history and literature at Harvard in 1966 and a B.Phil. in comparative literature (1968) and D.Phil. in modem languages (1972) at Oxford University. He taught at Cambridge University, Oxford University and Yale before coming to Cornell in 1977. In 1982 he was awarded an endowed chair as the Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature. He served as the director of the Society for the Humanities at Cornell from 1984 to 1993 and as the chair of the Department of Comparative Literature (1993-96) and of the Department of English (1996-99).

Culler is the recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford and subsequently of the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modem Language Association of America and of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He currently is president of the American Comparative Literature Association and is the author of several seminal texts in his field, including On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (1982), Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (1992) and Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (1997). His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.