Two Texas A&M University faculty have been appointed to senior leadership positions within the College of Arts and Sciences, announced Dean of Arts and Sciences Dr. Mark J. Zoran.
Dr. Cynthia A. Werner, professor and former head of the Department of Anthropology, has been named Senior Executive Associate Dean, while Dr. Simon W. North, professor and current head of the Department of Chemistry, has been named Executive Associate Dean. Werner has served as Acting Executive Associate Dean since August 2023 and will begin her new role immediately. North will transition from Head of Chemistry to his new role on June 1, 2024.
Both veteran professors assume their new administrative roles in conjunction with the college’s revamped organizational structure, approved January 2 by Texas A&M President Mark Welsh in alignment with his Quick-Look Assessment unveiled last fall.
Werner will be responsible for providing administrative leadership of and oversight for faculty affairs and undergraduate student affairs. She will work closely with the Arts and Sciences undergraduate team in their effort to support undergraduate academic programs, academic advising and core curriculum courses as well as initiatives that provide Arts and Sciences students with transformational learning experiences. In addition, she will continue to support activities and programs offered by the faculty affairs team, including the hiring of more than 60 new faculty positions in 2024.
North will provide leadership for the college’s research functions, graduate student affairs, facilities, technology services and lab operations. Beyond supporting the college’s 18 departments and dozens of research centers and institutes in their research-related endeavors, he will work to expand the Arts and Sciences research portfolio and build additional college and university-wide research collaborations. In addition, he will seek to help the college enrich its graduate programs.
“It has been my pleasure to work with Drs. Werner and North for many years, and I am very happy that they both have agreed to take on these new roles within our college leadership team," Zoran said. "They bring great experience as department heads and a wealth of knowledge and expertise in the areas I have asked them to oversee. In my review of arts and sciences governance structures across the U.S. and through discussions with my counterparts and stakeholders, I believe a college as large and diverse as our Arts and Sciences at Texas A&M will be truly best led by this team at the top of the organization.”
About Dr. Cynthia A. Werner
Werner has been the associate dean for faculty affairs in the college since June 2022. During the past year, she directed efforts to develop the new college's guidelines for faculty performance evaluation, in addition to the college's annual awards program. She earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from Indiana University in 1997 and joined the Texas A&M Anthropology faculty in 2001. She has been a longtime affiliate of the the Women’s and Gender Studies Program. In addition, she served as the head of Anthropology from 2011 to 2019, overseeing the introduction of a new bachelor's degree, a new master's of science degree and a new undergraduate minor, among other advancements.
Werner has been conducting ethnographic field research in the Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia for the past 30 years. Her research has focused on how relatively marginalized groups have been impacted by Soviet and post-Soviet state projects, including the Soviet emancipation of women, the Soviet nuclear testing program, the post-socialist economic transition and Kazakhstan’s ethnic repatriation program. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, National Research Council and American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is a past president of the Central Eurasian Studies Society (2012-14).
Werner previously has served as the director of ADVANCE at Texas A&M from 2019-22. During that time, she shifted her research accordingly while coordinating two regular workshops aimed at ensuring fair and equitable review processes for faculty hiring and faculty promotion. She led an ADVANCE research project on the differential impacts of COVID-19 on Texas A&M scholars that led to university guidelines for conducting faculty evaluations within the context of the pandemic. In addition, she has been involved in a collaborative, multidisciplinary research project examining forms of bias in the promotion and tenure review process.
"I am honored to take on this new role, and look forward to leading the newly reorganized leadership teams as we continue to support our departments while also building interdisciplinary connections within and beyond the college," Werner said.
About Dr. Simon W. North
North, the John W. Bevan Professor of Chemistry, has been the head of Texas A&M Chemistry since August 2016 after serving as interim head of the department for the previous seven months and as associate head from Sept. 2013 to Feb. 2016. He earned his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1995, then spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Brookhaven National Laboratory before coming to Texas A&M, where he is co-director of the National Aerothermochemistry Laboratory and a former associate director of the Center for Atmospheric Chemistry and the Environment.
North also served for nearly a decade as one of the primary advising and recruiting contacts for the Texas A&M Chemistry graduate program, which is the largest doctoral program at Texas A&M. In addition, he played a lead role in the planning, programming and championing of Texas A&M’s Instructional Laboratory & Innovative Learning Building (ILSQ), described as the premier laboratory building in the country and a showcase for undergraduate chemistry teaching laboratories spanning general chemistry to organic chemistry.
Widely respected for his teaching and research expertise in analytical and physical chemistry as well as in spectroscopy and dynamics, North and his research group seek to understand chemical reactivity on a microscopic quantum-state resolved level. His state-of-the-art laboratory contains equipment to perform experiments in chemical dynamics, energy transfer and kinetics and is associated with several interdisciplinary university research centers at Texas A&M. He also has led several impactful department-wide initiatives to revitalize the undergraduate curriculum in chemistry, including an overhaul of the upper division physical chemistry laboratory courses to better reflect the current state of modern research in the area. In addition to being recognized with the inaugural Administration Award in the College of Arts and Sciences last May, North is a past recipient of Texas A&M Association of Former Students Distinguished Achievement Awards in Teaching at both the university (2009) and college levels (2004 and 2010) — the last of which he was nominated for by his students.
"It has been an honor to serve as Head of the Department of Chemistry and to have the opportunity to get to know all the fantastic people who make up this department," North said. "Sharing in the joy of their many accomplishments through the years has been tremendously rewarding. I am grateful for the opportunity to work to elevate the College of Arts and Science in my new role.”
Learn more about the College of Arts and Sciences and its current leadership team.