The Essential Function of Universities

As provost and senior vice president for academic affairs of Lehigh University, Nathan Urban, PhD, leverages his expertise as a leader in higher education to help us understand the role that research universities must play in our evolution and development as a society, culture and economy. The university's role in doing research that creates new knowledge and preparing graduates to tackle problems that do not yet exist is, from his perspective, the path to a more secure future. Previous to Lehigh University, Nathan was a Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Neurobiology, the Associate Director of the University of Pittsburgh Brain Institute, and co-Director of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at the University of Pittsburgh; before that he was the Frederick Schwertz Distinguished Professor of Life Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, served as Head of the Department of Biological Sciences and as interim Provost.