G. Peter Lepage, the Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, has been reappointed to a five-year term beginning July 1, 2009. The reappointment was approved by the Cornell Board of Trustees on May 23, following the recommendations of President David J. Skorton and Provost Biddy Martin.

Martin said she received numerous comments on Lepage's deanship from members of the Arts and Sciences community. "Peter received strong support from the faculty and others who participated in the recent reappointment review," she said. "The responses were overwhelmingly positive, and I am confident that the college and university will be well served by Peter's leadership for another term. I have thoroughly enjoyed working with such a talented, dedicated and decent human being."

Lepage was first appointed dean of the college in March 2004 after serving an eight-month interim term. A physicist, he joined the Cornell faculty in 1980, after two years as a research associate in Cornell's Laboratory of Nuclear Studies. He was chair of the Cornell Department of Physics from 1999 to 2003.

During his current term, Lepage has overseen the hiring of approximately one-fourth of the college's current faculty. Undergraduate applications for admission to the college have risen 78 percent since 2003.

Lepage has built fundraising support for the college by placing an emphasis on academic priorities, including the establishment of professorships in chemistry, government and economics; and large, new departmental endowments for English, economics, government, music and philosophy. In this fiscal year alone, the college has raised $57 million (including more than $30 million in endowed funds for the humanities), double the amount raised in fiscal 2006-07. Giving to the annual fund also has doubled during his term, generating more than $2 million each year.

The first students in a new undergraduate major, China and Asia-Pacific Studies (CAPS), graduated with the Class of 2008, following a fall 2007 semester in Beijing.

The college also started construction on the $150 million physical sciences building project in conjunction with the College of Engineering during his term, and Lepage is now involved in the early planning stages for a new humanities building.

"He has been sensitive to academic needs and opportunities throughout the college, because he is an extremely curious person who is genuinely interested in everything our college does, and this has allowed him to see the opportunities in areas beyond his field of physics," said Harry Shaw, senior associate dean of the college.

As proof of this, Shaw noted that Lepage, working with the provost, tripled the amount of research funding available to humanists and some social scientists, funding that had "remained basically flat since the early 1980s," Shaw said.

Lepage has a B.Sc. degree from McGill University and a Ph.D. from Stanford University, both in physics. As an undergraduate he also studied at the University of Cambridge. He has spent his entire professorial career at Cornell. He received tenure after only four years as an assistant professor of physics and was promoted to professor in 1990.

His recent physics research is particularly notable for the first high-precision computer simulations in the 30-year history of QCD (quantum chromodynamics). QCD is the fundamental theory of quarks and gluons that describes the internal structure of protons, neutrons and other subnuclear particles.

Lepage has had visiting appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; the Institute for Nuclear Theory, Seattle; Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago; the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California-Santa Barbara; and the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge.

He received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996-97 and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in 1990. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society. This year he was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.