Boston University Appoints Kenneth Lutchen to Top Research Job
Boston University Appoints Kenneth Lutchen to Top Research Job
Kenneth Lutchen “brings a wealth of leadership experience and a deep commitment to advancing Boston University’s research mission,” according to Gloria Waters, University provost and chief academic officer. Photo by Jake Belcher
Boston University Appoints Kenneth Lutchen to Top Research Job
Renowned biomedical engineer, influential researcher, and transformative higher education leader is new vice president and associate provost for research
Boston University has appointed pioneering biomedical engineer and experienced higher education leader Kenneth Lutchen as its new vice president and associate provost for research. He will lead BU’s $500 million research enterprise, which spurs new knowledge and impactful advances. In the past year alone, BU researchers have launched a global AI-powered infectious diseases monitoring tool, engineered devices that could improve cancer treatment, and landed a telescope on the moon.
Lutchen has held a variety of teaching and leadership positions since joining BU; he was most recently senior advisor to the president, strategy and innovation, and cochairs the Task Force on Convergent Research and Education. For 17 years, he was a transformative dean of BU’s College of Engineering, fostering its reputation as a leader in innovative and convergent research and as an institution focused on addressing pressing societal challenges. Lutchen also spent a year as interim provost during the University’s recent presidential transition.
“Ken brings a wealth of leadership experience and a deep commitment to advancing Boston University’s research mission,” said Gloria Waters, University provost and chief academic officer, in a letter to the BU community. “At a time when the national and global research funding landscape is increasingly competitive and complex, Ken’s vision, experience, and commitment to innovation will help ensure that Boston University continues to expand its impact through discovery, scholarship, and collaboration.”
BU is one of the nation’s leading research universities—with 130 centers and institutes and more than 1,500 laboratories—and is a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities, an organization of 71 distinguished research universities. Last year, Boston University researchers produced more than 7,600 publications and won $574.25 million in total research awards. In addition to leading BU’s research efforts, Lutchen will represent the University to local, national, and international stakeholders, including in government, industry, and foundations.
Lutchen, whose appointment was effective September 1, replaces Thomas Bifano, a BU College of Engineering professor of mechanical engineering and director of the University-wide Photonics Center. Bifano, who will continue in those positions, had held the research leadership role on an interim basis since July 2024. Waters said Bifano had led the research office with distinction, bringing “stability and momentum…during a year marked by unprecedented change.”
An influential researcher in his own right, Lutchen has published more than 150 peer-reviewed journal articles that have together been cited more than 10,000 times. Renowned as an expert on computational and imaging-based models of pulmonary function, much of his work has been focused on advancing lung care, particularly in asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Earlier this year, Lutchen was named an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow, an honor that recognizes innovators with scientifically and socially distinguished careers.
The Brink spoke with Lutchen about his vision for research at BU, the challenging national science and funding environment, and harnessing the energy and ideas that students bring to labs.
Q&A
with Kenneth Lutchen
The Brink: What are your priorities as you step into this new role?
Lutchen: My priority is to identify several things. What are the strategic areas and approaches to not only sustain, but maybe even grow the research success and impact of our research on society? And that includes not just the thematic strategies, the areas, but also the tactics of how we go about succeeding in that, especially at a time when higher education—including funding of higher education by the federal government—is in a very changeable environment. That also means we need to figure out the most strategic ways to spend our funds on research, whether it’s hiring priorities or facilities. That’s the big 30,000-foot priority that I have.
I happen to have been cochairing a task force on convergence with Darrell Kotton at the medical school and one of the goals is to help us assess what BU is very well known for and doing extremely well from a scholarship and research point of view: What are those themes? Particularly the themes that cut across multiple disciplines, because that means they are probably well aligned to address really important societal challenges. And those are likely the areas where funding is out there to help find really creative, impactful solutions.
The Brink: What do you see as BU’s research strengths? What are the areas that you’re enthused about and excited to tell the world about?
Lutchen: The convergent task force has already done an extraordinary outreach effort to virtually every single research faculty member, and all the leaders, deans, associate deans in the University. And we’ve identified several major, large themes that BU is very strong in. One we’re calling health across the lifespan, where BU has been doing some tremendously exciting work that cuts across multiple departments: digital and predictive personalized medicine, neuroscience and brain and cognitive health, synthetic biology and cell and tissue engineering, neurophotonics. We have some very strong work in areas of healthcare inequities, understanding the healthcare innovation system from an economic point of view and linking that to translating ideas to practice.
We’re also very strong in the general field of global sustainability. That’s an area that requires expertise in everything from technologies for renewable and low-carbon energy, carbon mitigation, and environmental modeling to different ways to understand law, economics, and public policy—and even understanding misinformation and disinformation. We also have a lot of strength in infection, inflammatory, and immune disorders; artificial intelligence, data science, and computing; childhood and adolescent well-being; urban development and resilience; and the arts, the humanities, and the human condition.
The Brink: How do you hope to use this role to foster those connections between researchers from different disciplines and help them create new pathways for impact?
Lutchen: One of the charges I’ll have is to take the work from the convergent task force and identify the most effective ways to accelerate the success of a convergent approach to really impactful research. We’ll have to figure out different ways, for example, to stand up what I call convergent hiring initiatives, where you hire research faculty that are aligned with one of these cross-disciplinary convergent themes that we’re strong in. We can do the same thing with seed grant funding. How do we fund some early research to get people together across these disciplines, to think really intellectually fearlessly and go after a big, major impact funding opportunity? We’ll even look at new ways to fund and attract PhD students that are coming to work across disciplines on a societal challenge.
The Brink: For some people reading this, it might be the first time that they’ve heard the term “convergent research.” What is it and why is it so important in helping us take on these big societal challenges?
Convergence is really a deeper level of cross-disciplinary interaction. People are being brought together at the beginning of the process of trying to identify solutions to societal challenges. And by working together, they come up with a creative new approach that none of them alone would have come up with. That’s the key: the methods and approaches to solve the problem are the most impactful because they included all the different dimensions of the problem early on. And in some cases, the convergence of them early on creates a brand-new methodology that didn’t exist in any one discipline on its own. We have examples of that here at BU: synthetic biology is one.
The faculty feel that the word convergence is more powerful than interdisciplinary, because it conveys a bringing together and converging on something new that doesn’t exist until you get that interaction going.
The Brink: We’ve done a lot of stories at The Brink on undergraduates involved in research, and it’s a big part of the BU experience for many. Why is it so important for BU to involve its undergraduates in research?
I’m deeply proud of BU’s culture and philosophy of wanting to encourage, support, and mentor undergraduates in the research activities of the institution. As a research active faculty myself, I probably average five to seven undergraduates in my lab. They get deeply motivated to pursue research careers, whether in industry or the next level up in education. It’s an incredibly important experiential component for students to figure out how their undergraduate education translates to practice in real life. It embeds in them a sense of confidence and skills that they would not get simply from the didactic classroom. They also come up with really clever ideas—sometimes crazy ideas that you suddenly realize might work. They’re such young, exciting minds.
The institution has two major missions academically: to educate and create a perpetual set of holistic citizens that are prepared to have a positive impact on the world, and to do research that advances new knowledge and translates that knowledge to ideas to impact society. Those are overlapping areas.
The Brink: And showing impact is especially important as we make the case for why universities like BU should be involved in research, why it’s important for society.
I think most of society, including our senators and congresspeople, appreciate that the model of the federal government partnering with universities to help advance cutting-edge research is a critical contributor to the economic strength of the United States, and the quality of life of people in the United States. It’s a model that is unachievable by the private sector only, because the private sector cannot do cutting-edge research that may not pay off in the short term; they depend on the university systems to create those ideas that will translate out into potential ways to impact society.
That model cannot go away; if it does, we’re in deep trouble economically as a nation. I deeply believe that and that’s why I wanted to take on this position.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
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