Alan Snyder, Vice President and Associate Provost for Research and Graduate Studies, to Step Down in Summer 2022

During his time at Lehigh, Snyder has championed and celebrated scholarship across campus and built the university’s capacity to support research program and faculty development, sponsored programs and research integrity. After a yearlong leave, he will return to the Lehigh faculty in Fall 2023.

“Since his arrival at Lehigh, Alan has dedicated himself to supporting the success of Lehigh research and all who engage in it: faculty, students and staff. His efforts have helped shape an environment that celebrates discovery and collaboration, and invites deep and thoughtful questioning within and across disciplines. We are thankful for his service,” said Nathan Urban, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs.

Inspired by Research

Snyder earned a B.S. in engineering science from Penn State. During that time, he was invited to work in the lab of the university’s world-renowned artificial heart program.

“I actually went to apologize to a professor for missing two classes in a row. Why a student apologizes to a professor for missing a class is another story,” Snyder said with a laugh. The professor’s response was an invitation to work in the lab. There, Snyder focused on signal processing, data analysis and visualization of flow fields in prosthetic blood pumps and valves. He found a home in the lab, and by the time he completed his undergraduate coursework, he was deeply involved in the project.

Snyder continued on to earn a Ph.D. in bioengineering, also from Penn State. He finished his coursework at the College of Medicine in Hershey, Pa., where the project was organized. His role focused on the development of electronic control systems for prosthetic blood pumps. At that point, he said, he couldn’t walk away from the project, even though he’d completed his doctorate.

He stayed in Hershey, taking a research faculty position followed by a tenure-track position. He eventually moved into several administrative roles at Penn State’s College of Medicine, including vice chair for research in the department of surgery, associate dean for technology development, and interim vice dean for research and graduate studies for the College of Medicine, which also served as associate vice president for health sciences research for the university “with a charge to connect the full scope campus at University Park with the campus at Hershey.”

During that time, Snyder worked with colleagues across the university to share resources and collaborate on joint research investment programs. A major part of his role was to lead Penn State’s successful response to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) call for renewed relationships between university research and the health concerns of the public. He and colleagues across 7 colleges worked together to make a compelling case for how Penn State would change its research agenda to better serve citizens’ health concerns and needs.

“Nationally, this was a moment of reckoning for a health science research enterprise that had become insulated from the health concerns of the public,” said Snyder. “I became excited by the notion of authentic public engagement, by how public concerns could more directly shape the research portfolio. In many ways, this was a renewal of the old land grant covenant, by which the university sees itself as accountable for attending to what’s going on out in the field. I also recognized that in pursuing this course, no single family of disciplines, no single way of seeking knowledge, would be sufficient in isolation or should be valorized.”

This is what was on Snyder’s mind when he received a call from the late Ed Shapiro, professor of school psychology, chair of the search committee for Lehigh’s new vice president and associate vice provost for research and graduate studies.

“I thought, ‘Oh, my goodness. Here was a university whose identity and aspirations fit with my thinking about how universities needed to be: purposeful, publicly engaged, valuing the ways in which theory informs practice and also the ways in engagement with practitioners and publics can challenge theory, confident enough in its capacities to carry itself with the humility that underlies all great scholarship. This is extraordinary.’”

Dedication, Celebration & Support

In his more than a decade at Lehigh, Snyder has led the university’s significant expansion of investment in faculty research, including the introduction of new, larger-scale research investment programs such as Collaborative Research Opportunity (CORE) and Accelerator grants. In 2019, Lehigh introduced its Research Futures investment programs, a $20 million investment in research programs, organizational capacity and infrastructure, and faculty recruiting, which Snyder at the time described as an “investment in expansion of the faculty and staff, and in our growth as a research university, in accord with our shared aspirations, the needs of our students, and our intended place in the world of higher education and the world.” These types of internal grants have helped advance the scholarship of many Lehigh faculty, and all were crafted to support research in all fields of study.

“I very much appreciate Alan's leadership in expanding the breadth and increasing the resources available for research at Lehigh,” said Judith Lasker, professor emerita of sociology and health, medicine and society. “Without the funding he made available to sponsor a wide variety of projects, my own work and that of many others would have suffered significantly. I am grateful for his continuing support as a colleague and friend even after my retirement and wish him much-continued success and fulfillment in the future. He leaves Lehigh a better place because of his time here.”

Said Michael Kramp, professor of English and director of the Lehigh Humanities Lab: “Alan has demonstrated consistently that he wants to listen to all faculty members, regardless of rank or discipline or whether they shared his ideas or not—or even whether they were just going to critique him. He is consistently willing to listen and seek dialogue. He is always interested in learning about ways to improve the experiences of research, intellectual inquiry, and perhaps most importantly, academic community. He really believes in the work of a vibrant intellectual community, the differences and diversities of this community, and the urgent need to help all of us practice this work more ethically and responsibly.”

Steven McIntosh, professor and chair of chemical and biomolecular engineering and associate director of the Institute for Functional Materials and Devices, added: “Alan will leave a legacy of championing interdisciplinary research, encouraging faculty to explore the most creative, innovative and exciting new directions found at the intersection of research fields. In my own work, he did this through the early stage research seed funds—FIG, CORE, Accelerator—and through working with him on the design and realization of the HST building.”

Snyder further developed the office of the Vice President for Research, focusing on its ability to serve the needs of Lehigh researchers in a manner that’s comprehensive and meets external expectations in a very complex environment. He has supported the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs in its development as a robust, scalable and professional operation. He established the Office of Research Integrity, and, similarly, supported its development as an increasingly comprehensive resource. He also established research program development, with a substantial emphasis on faculty career development, as a function of his office.

His team has presented workshops and seminars on proposal writing, communications and other topics in support of faculty development. Through initiatives such as the Faculty Forum and the Research Cafe series, he also worked to make Lehigh’s campus one at which being stimulated by ideas from outside one’s immediate discipline is part of the normal day-to-day experience. He expressed gratitude for his team.

“I have the great fortune of working with an amazing team,” he said. “They are experts in their individual areas. They're guided in their work by that expertise, by their dedication to the university mission, by their regard for each other and their many partners and collaborators across the university, and by their desire to support the people who do the research, contribute to our students' growth and serve the public good. Some of what our team does is highly visible, and some is, by design, invisible to the people we support. In all cases, I'm grateful for what our team does every day.”

With a core group of founding faculty and staff, Snyder established the Mountaintop program, with its goal of establishing experience in praxis as a key component of a Lehigh education. He considers this among his proudest accomplishments.

“The idea, to me, was that the scholar’s way of being in the world, whereby what you know is cool, but what you don’t know is where you gravitate, has lifelong value for students. Look at the world acutely and it will evoke a lot of wonderful and important questions. Students would tend to start with ways in which they wanted to repair the world, as 20-year-olds, thankfully, tend to want to do,” he said. “Coached to start somewhere and reflect on their work honestly and critically, they will find their way into the virtuous circle of informed action and critical reflection. They may discover what they originally proposed to do in a semester is really a lifelong—or longer—quest. That's okay because what we're really doing is habituating the coupling of purpose and learning, doing it with honesty and humility and never with hubris. To work in an environment in which it’s okay to realize that your original idea is going nowhere is liberating. It happens to scholars all the time.”

In 2015-2016, Snyder convened and supported faculty task forces that articulated visions for Lehigh research and graduate education. He has been a devoted advocate for the graduate student experience, recognizing that graduate students “should be prepared and encouraged to head off in all kinds of directions.” He advocated that “Lehigh undergraduate education should look more like graduate education, in that we cultivate capacity for independent inquiry, and graduate education should look more like undergraduate education, in that we cultivate the whole person.”

“I feel incredibly lucky to have worked with Alan for about a decade,” says Kathleen Hutnik, associate deputy provost for graduate education. “A deeply ethical and principled person, Alan has always centered our aspirations for graduate education around what is best for students: how to provide them with the richest academic, research and professional development opportunities that will lead to the variety of careers they seek, never forgetting to ensure their well-being and recognition for the many contributions to Lehigh's mission. I cannot even count how many wonderful conversations we've had, but each one has fortified and inspired me to keep striving to create the best possible environment for this population of students. To work with Alan is to know that your work matters, is honorable and important.”

Said Snyder: “I came here wanting to do something different, really appreciating the license that [former Lehigh President] Alice Gast gave me to define the role on my own terms. I began with a relatively conventional understanding of the role of vice president for research, as that’s all I’d ever seen. I was absolutely committed, though, to honoring and supporting all forms of scholarship, regardless of the thought tradition from which it derived and regardless of whether the work was costly to do. From that starting point, I just learned from the people around me. Of course, you often learn the most from those most different from you.

“What’s really important to me is what I’ve learned from people. It’s not content, per se, it’s the way people in different disciplines even look at the world that’s so endlessly fascinating and important.”