On Dec. 19, IU announced Jorge Jose, vice president of research, will step down in July once his five-year term ends.
Jose intends to take a year-long sabbatical focusing on his research in the field of neuroscience. Following this research, he will return to IU and serve as a Rudy professor of physics at IU-Bloomington and a member of the department of cellular and integrative physiology at the IU School of Medicine in ?Indianapolis.
“One of the main benefits of joining IU was my appointment with both the physics program and the medical school, allowing me to form collaborations across ?campuses,” Jose said.
According to a press release from IU, President Michael McRobbie has yet to appoint someone to succeed Jose but intends to find someone soon within the beginning of the new year.
Since his start in August 2010, Jose has brought a variety of research programs and administered an 18-percent increase in federally-funded research by IU faculty members. His research overall helped mold IU’s bicentennial strategic priorities approved by the IU Board of Trustees at the end of 2014.
Prior to his time at IU, Jose worked a five-year term at the University of Buffalo as vice president for research. Although the titles were one in the same, the position entailed a completely different work load, almost incomparable to Jose’s work at IU.
“Each university has a very different DNA,” Jose said. “I served 23,000 students on Buffalo’s campus and a total of 110,000 students in all of IU’s campuses.”
Jose looks at both experiences as rewarding but sees his time at IU as having a more powerful impact through his contributions in his work.
As the vice president of research Jose is in charge of an array of responsibilities that relate to the research efforts of IU as a whole. He is responsible for, and oversees all research and creative activities ?carried out by faculty members from all eight IU ?campuses.
This also encompasses federally-funded programming that allows more research to be executed. Jose makes any effort to continue and strengthen research opportunities to allow knowledge to continuously flow.
“I mostly seed funding programs to develop ideas and manage grants and resources needed by faculty members to carry out their research properly,” ?Jose said.
The most rewarding aspects of Jose’s position are the abilities to conduct his own personal research and oversee the research projects that he helped start at IU. Jose is currently carrying out a study about the movement of autistic children.
Jose has been studying the strong connection between movement of the body and cognition, and with this knowledge has made a quantitative way to measure this cognition. This measurement system was made through interdisciplinary research ranging from psychologists to geneticists to assist in the research needed.
Jose was one of the main hands in forming IU collaboration research groups, which lead to projects that had an investment of $1 million turn into $88 million just in the first year alone.
Additionally, Jose was the face behind IU receiving $300,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to help fund new frontiers for the arts and humanities departments on campus.
Once Jose returns to IU as a physics professor, he said he is excited to continue his research and fully reboot his career.
“The history and traditions are engraved into the school,” Jose said. “I am glad my research has not yet ended.”
