All Over Albany

Interim UAlbany president named

The SUNY Board of Trustees announced Wednesday that James Stellar will serve as as UAlbany's interim president after current president Robert Jones leaves at the end of this month for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Stellar is currently provost and a senior vice president at the university, and has been involved with starting both the new College of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity. Press release blurbage:

Stellar previously served at CUNY's Queens College as vice president for Academic Innovation and Experiential Education from 2013 to 2015, and provost and vice president for academic affairs from 2009 to 2014. Before joining CUNY, Stellar spent 22 years at Northeastern University in Boston, where he served for a decade as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences as well as professor and chair of psychology and associate dean for undergraduate affairs. He began his academic career at Harvard University, serving eight years as assistant and then associate professor in the Department of Psychology and Social Relations, and as a neuroscience researcher at the McLean Hospital of Harvard Medical School.

He earned his doctorate in biological psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in biology from Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pa.

UAlbany says Stellar will be paid $390,000 with an additional $110,000 from the SUNY Research Foundation. (That's basically what Jones was paid at the start of his term in 2012, plus a $60k housing allowance.)

For what it's worth: the UAlbany president before Robert Jones -- George Philip -- also started the job with the interim tag.

UAlbany has a lot of notable projects in progress right now, those two new colleges among the biggest. It's planning for $60 million conversion of the old Albany high school building at Western and Lake on the downtown campus into the home of the new engineering college (and, the hope is, for it to also serve as a hub for neighborhood development there). And it's building a $184 million project on the Harriman State Office Campus to house the emergency preparedness project. And it's also aiming to increase enrollment to 20,000 (from about 17,500 right now) by 2020.