Texas A&M University chemist Dr. Simon W. North has been selected as one of the university’s four Southeastern Conference (SEC) Academic Leadership Development Program (ALDP) Fellows for 2024-2025, announced by Texas A&M Faculty Affairs.
Each year, the SEC offers its 14 member schools a unique opportunity to foster potential academic administration talent through fellowships that help prepare up-and-coming faculty leaders for further positions and careers in executive service. The SEC ALDP launched in 2007, and Texas A&M has appointed four fellows each year since joining the SEC in 2012. Program alumni have advanced to serve the university as deans, vice provosts and in other executive roles.
This year’s fellowship class includes two executive associate deans, an associate dean and an interim department head. North, a professor in the Department of Chemistry and executive associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, joins Dr. Tamika Gilreath, a professor and associate dean for faculty affairs in the School of Public Health; Dr. Phil Lewis, a professor and interim head of the Department of Construction Science; and Dr. Ramesh Vemulapalli, a professor in the Department of Veterinary Pathobiology and executive associate dean in the School of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, as Texas A&M’s representatives in the SEC’s 16th overall ALDP cohort.
North has served since June 1 as executive associate dean in Texas A&M Arts and Sciences, where provides leadership for the college’s research functions, graduate student affairs, facilities, technology services and laboratory operations. He joined the Texas A&M Chemistry faculty in 1997 after earning his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1995 and completing a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Before assuming his current administrative role, North had been the head of Texas A&M Chemistry since August 2016 after serving as interim head of the department for the previous seven months and as associate head from Sept. 2013 to Feb. 2016. He was appointed as the John W. Bevan Professor of Chemistry in 2019 and is co-director of the National Aerothermochemistry Laboratory as well as a former associate director of the Center for Atmospheric Chemistry and the Environment.
North also served for nearly a decade as one of the primary advising and recruiting contacts for the Texas A&M Chemistry graduate program, which is the largest doctoral program at Texas A&M. In addition, he played a lead role in the planning, programming and championing of Texas A&M’s Instructional Laboratory and Innovative Learning Building (ILSQ), described as the premier laboratory building in the country and a showcase for undergraduate chemistry teaching laboratories spanning general chemistry to organic chemistry.
Widely respected for his teaching and research expertise in analytical and physical chemistry as well as in spectroscopy and dynamics, North and his research group seek to understand chemical reactivity on a microscopic quantum-state resolved level. His state-of-the-art laboratory contains equipment to perform experiments in chemical dynamics, energy transfer and kinetics and is associated with several interdisciplinary university research centers at Texas A&M. He also has led several impactful department-wide initiatives to revitalize the undergraduate curriculum in chemistry, including an overhaul of the upper division physical chemistry laboratory courses to better reflect the current state of modern research in the area.
In addition to being recognized with the inaugural Administration Award in the College of Arts and Sciences in May 2023, North is a past recipient of Texas A&M Association of Former Students Distinguished Achievement Awards in Teaching at both the university (2009) and college levels (2004 and 2010) — the last of which he was nominated for by his students.
Texas A&M ALDP fellows are nominated by deans, vice presidents and associate provosts and represent tenured faculty and leaders in governance, professional societies or national and regional roles critical to the academy. Early career administrators, such as department heads and associate/assistant deans in their first terms, are often tapped for their potential to contribute significantly in leadership roles throughout their careers.
Fellows participate in a university-level development program designed by each institution for its own fellows along with two SEC-wide, three-day workshops held on specified campuses for all program participants.
See the comprehensive list of Texas A&M ALDP fellows or learn more about the overall program.