Bacon named associate VP for Knowledge Enterprise Development
Sid P. Bacon, who served as dean of natural sciences at Arizona State University for nearly five years, has been named associate vice president for Knowledge Enterprise Development, announced Sethuraman “Panch” Panchanathan, senior vice president. The appointment is effective Jan. 1.
As dean of the largest division in ASU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Bacon oversaw an enterprise of some of ASU’s oldest core academic units, including physics, psychology, mathematics and chemistry/biochemistry and one of its newest transdisciplinary schools: the School of Earth and Space Exploration. During his tenure as dean, there were 350 tenured/tenure track faculty and annual research expenditures growth of nearly 30 percent.
Professor Bacon, an auditory psychophysicist, has been with ASU since 1988. He served as chair of the Department of Speech and Hearing Science from 2004-2006, leading a department of 12 tenured/tenure track faculty whose research expenditures roughly doubled to $3.4 million.
“Dr. Bacon is an accomplished researcher and an effective leader,” said Panchanathan. “In his recent role as dean of the natural sciences, he successfully brought together faculty and units to achieve their goals. In his new role in Knowledge Enterprise Development at ASU, he will work closely with the faculty, units and colleges to help advance their research ideas, programs and projects.”
“I am excited to join OKED and to help advance the research enterprise at ASU,” Bacon said. “We have incredibly talented faculty and students throughout the university and it will be a pleasure to work with them to advance their research and scholarship.
“As a principal investigator, former dean and department chair, I understand the value of research and research administration and I look forward to doing all I can to ensure that faculty and students have the opportunity to experience the joy of research,” Bacon said.
In addition to his administrative duties, Bacon will continue his research and work with undergraduate students, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in the Psychoacoustics Laboratory, concentrating on behavioral aspects of hearing. His research, which has been funded continuously by the National Institutes of Health for more than 25 years, has implications for the way in which humans perceive sounds such as speech and music. He recently initiated a newly funded research program on electric-acoustic hearing.
Bacon has a doctorate in experimental psychology from the University of Minnesota, and a master’s degree in audiology and a bachelor’s degree in speech pathology and audiology from the University of Kansas. He is a fellow of the Acoustical Society of America and the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. He also is editor of the section on hearing for the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.