Dr. Hobson Wildenthal, the provost and executive vice president of UT Dallas, has assumed the role of president ad interim of the university. He succeeds Dr. David Daniel, who will now serve as the chief operating officer and deputy chancellor of the University of Texas system. Dr. Inga Musselman, the senior vice provost of UT Dallas, will serve as acting provost while Dr. Wildenthal serves as president ad interim.
Dr. Wildenthal has previously stated that his main priority is to ensure a seamless transition between the presidential administration of Dr. Daniel and the presidential administration of the next president of UT Dallas. The new president will be identified after a search process organized by the UT system, according to carefully structured guidelines. The candidate chosen by the search process will then be appointed to the president post by the Board of Regents.
“My goal is very simple,” said Dr. Wildenthal. “It is to do everything in my capability to assist our faculty and staff to continue our impressive progress toward educating many of the best students of Texas and the world and to making major contributions to America’s efforts to discover, invent, and create new knowledge.”
Dr. Wildenthal has served as the chief academic officer at UT Dallas since 1992. He received a doctorate in physics from the University of Kansas. After earning his doctorate, he held positions at Rice University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Texas A&M University, and Michigan State University. He published more than 200 articles on his experiemental and theoretical research on atomic nuclei before entering higher education administration. He became an administrator at Drexel University, where he held the post of department head of physics and atmospheric science, and then became dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of New Mexico before joining UT Dallas.