Dr. James V. Maher, a member of the Saint Vincent Seminary Board of Regents since 1999, has been elected Vice Chairman of the Board.
Dr. Maher is Provost Emeritus of the University of Pittsburgh. He is also Professor of Physics and Astronomy, and Senior Science Advisor. He served as Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor from July 1, 1994, to August 15, 2010 and has been a member of the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh for forty years.
Dr. Maher earned his bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Notre Dame in 1964. He earned his master’s and doctoral degrees from Yale University in 1965 and 1969, respectively. Prior to joining the University of Pittsburgh faculty as an assistant professor in September 1970, Dr. Maher served as a post-doctoral research associate in the Physics Division of the Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Illinois.
During his tenure at the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Maher has served as director of the University’s Scaife Nuclear Physics Laboratory, as a longstanding resident fellow in the University’s Center for the Philosophy of Science, and as a visiting scientist at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, the Kernfysisch Versneller Instituut in Groningen, the College de France in Paris, and the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago. Elected a fellow of both the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Dr. Maher has published numerous papers in refereed journals on the fields of nuclear physics (up through 1980) and statistical condensed matter physics (since 1980). He has presented numerous invited talks at topical conferences and physical society meetings.
Dr. Maher is a member of the Board of Trustees’ Information Technology Committee at the University’s partner institution, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and serves on numerous national and local professional society committees and boards, including the Carnegie Science Center Board of Directors, and the Board of Directors of BioOne.
He served as chair of the Council of Academic Affairs of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities and was a member of the Association of American University’s (AAU) Intellectual Property Task Force that authored the formative 1999 report “Intellectual Property and New Media Technologies: A Framework for Policy Development at AAU Institutions.” He served on the AAU/National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges (NASULGC) Task Force on Accreditation, which developed a set of principles adopted by the AAU and NASULGC and accepted in modified form by the Council on Higher Education Accreditation. He was invited by the AAU and Association of Research Libraries to participate in writing the influential Tempe Principles on Scholarly Communications, a set of principles designed to guide the transformation of the scholarly publishing system.
