Wiley named interim director of Wisconsin Institute for Discovery

Wiley named interim director of Wisconsin Institute for Discovery

Madison, Wis. – John Wiley, whose tenure as the chancellor of University of Wisconsin-Madison will end this fall, has been named the new interim director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, according to the university.
Wiley will succeed Marsha Mailick Seltzer, who has served as director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery in addition to director UW’s Waisman Center. His appointment is effective Nov. 1, 2008.
“We’re very pleased that John Wiley has agreed to continue to serve the university by accepting this critical position,” UW-Madison Graduate School Dean Martin Cadwallader said in a statement released by the university. “He, of course, brings a wealth of experience and the kinds of connections that will help us develop the institute to its fullest potential and position it well for the future.”
The institute is the public half of a new research center that will promote interdisciplinary science and public-private collaboration. The private part is the Morgridge Institute for Research, funded by $50 million donations from Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and John and Tashia Morgridge. In February, stem cell researcher James Thomson was named director of regenerative biology for the Morgridge Institute.
Groundbreaking on the twin institutes was held earlier this year, and they will open in 2010.
Wiley will step down as chancellor this fall and be replaced by Carolyn “Biddy” Martin, a UW-Madison alumnus who has served as he provost at Cornell University since 2000.
The university described Wiley’s interim post as a “25 percent” appointment. Wiley also will serve as professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis and at the Robert M. LaFollette School of Public Affairs. He also will have a zero-dollar appointment as senior scholar at The Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Post-secondary Education (WISCAPE).
Cadwallader lauded Seltzer’s service, noting she developed a plan for staffing the institute with faculty members in academic disciplines like nanotechnology, biology, and computational sciences.