The Academic Council has nominated Sandra Weiss, a professor of nursing and psychology at UC, San Francisco, to be its next vice-chair. As such, Weiss is almost certain to assume the vice-chair's post next fall and to succeed, in 1997, to the position of chair of the Academic Council -- the most important office in the statewide Academic Senate.
The Senate's Universitywide Assembly will consider Weiss' nomination at its meeting in Irvine on May 23, along with any nominations that might come from the floor. In recent years the Assembly has given its approval to the Council nominee.
Weiss currently is on leave from her faculty position while serving a one-year appointment as Associate Vice-Provost for Research in UC's Office of the President. She comes to the Council nomination with an extensive record of Senate and university governance service, both at the statewide and campus levels. She was Chair of the UCSF Senate in 1994 and 1995, its vice-chair in 1993 and a member of such UCSF Senate committees as Committee on Committees, and Academic Planning and Budget. Her systemwide work includes service on the Senate's Academic Council and on UC's Academic Planning Council and its Task Force on the Research Climate (which she co-chaired).
Weiss received a bachelor of science degree from the University of San Francisco and M.S. and D.N.Sc. degrees from UCSF. She received her Ph.D. in biological and developmental psychology from UC Berkeley and subsequently was director of an NIH-funded research initiative while holding an appointment as a clinical professor at UCSF. In 1980 she was appointed an associate professor on the campus and is currently a professor in its Department of Community Health Systems. She is director of a long-term study, currently funded by NIH, on neurobehavioral development in high-risk infants and has twice been awarded the UCSF Senate's Distinguished Teaching Award. Weiss will be coming to her two years of Academic Council service with several goals in mind.
"I want to further a commitment within the Senate to 'one great University,' while recognizing individual campus needs and issues," she says. Second, she would like to foster "a closer working relationship between the Senate and the Regents in the establishment of universitywide policy." Finally, she says, she would like "to increase the efforts of the Senate that take the form of strategic initiatives and proactive planning, as opposed to the reactive efforts that now take up so much of the Senate's time."