Ilene Busch-Vishniac will step down as dean of the Whiting School of Engineering as of June 30, 2003, the end of her five-year term. She will remain at the School as a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Hopkins President William R. Brody, in accepting her decision with regret, noted that next year, Busch-Vishniac assumes her role as president of the 7,000-member Acoustical Society of America, the major professional society in her discipline. He added that she also looks forward to the opportunity to resume her research in acoustics and her teaching, and to spending more time with her family. The dean and her husband, Ethan Vishniac, a professor of physics and astronomy at Hopkins, have two teenage daughters.

“Dean Busch-Vishniac’s dedicated leadership as the third dean of the Whiting School has yielded extraordinary results,” Brody observed. “The School today is stronger, larger, more diverse, and better supported than when she arrived in 1998. Ilene has fostered substantial growth in enrollment and sponsored research.” He commended her efforts in recruiting promising young scholars to the School’s faculty and in strengthening undergraduate programs. She has “overseen the extraordinarily successful establishment of the Whitaker Biomedical Engineering Institute and construction of its splendid home, Clark Hall,” Brody added, and “she provided leadership for the creation of the University’s Information Security Institute.”

During her four years as the first woman to be dean of the Whiting School:

• undergraduate Engineering enrollment has increased 20 percent;
• the number of research centers has grown from nine to 16; and
• while the Engineering faculty has increased from 111 to 116, research funding has had a dramatic growth to $51 million (2002), up from $34.4 million in 1998.

A national search is being launched to seek her successor as dean.