BOZEMAN – Montana State University Vice President for Research and Economic Development Renee Reijo Pera will depart the university in August for a position at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, California.
MSU President Waded Cruzado announced the news in a letter to campus.
“Dr. Reijo Pera has done much to help create a strong and diverse research enterprise for the university that will help its sustainability long into the future. Under her watch, MSU has seen a record in research expenditures, important new faculty hires, an increase in undergraduate and graduate research, and a focus on serving the needs of Montana through many important new centers in the sciences and humanities,” Cruzado said. “We thank her for her service and wish her the very best going forward.”
Reijo Pera will become Cal Poly’s new vice president of research and economic development.
“I’m going to miss Montana State University, especially the faculty, my staff and students. I have been incredibly honored to serve as vice president of research at MSU. We have done great things, across disciplines including re-entering the highest research classification of Carnegie, a goal the faculty set forth early in my tenure here,” Reijo Pera said. “Now, I look forward to being a part of defining success in research at Cal Poly in a way that will resonate throughout the Cal Poly community and the central coast.”
In January, the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research’s Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education placed MSU in its “very high research” category. MSU is one of 130 universities nationwide – out of 4,338 U.S. higher education institutions – to be included in this category.
Reijo Pera joined MSU as a vice president in January 2014. She led efforts to grow and evolve MSU’s research enterprise to be more service-oriented and meet the needs of the state, nation and world. She helped grow MSU’s total research expenditures to a new record of $131 million.
That has included overseeing strategies for increasing graduate and undergraduate research opportunities. The number of student projects funded increased during her tenure by more than 20 percent.
Reijo Pera helped form the university’s newest strategic plan, which includes an intentional focus on improving Montana through research by emphasizing the environment, sustainability, wellness and security.
Reijo Pera also helped launch the MSU Innovation Campus and its first tenant, the Applied Research Laboratory, which is currently under construction and will allow MSU faculty to engage in classified research for the U.S. departments of Energy, Defense and Homeland Security.
“It was a goal of mine to diversify MSU’s research portfolio so that it could be more sustainable and stable going forward. The Applied Research Lab will play an important role in that,” Reijo Pera said.
In 2014 and 2015, Reijo Pera worked with leaders across the Montana University System and within the Montana Legislature on the first Montana Research and Economic Development Initiative, which allocated $15 million in state funds to university research through a competitive grant program. MSU ended up winning $9 million of the total.
She oversaw the foundation of a number of centers and institutes, including the Ivan Doig Center for the Study of the Lands and Peoples of the North American West, the Center for American Indian and Rural Health Equity, the Center for Translational Research – American Indian & Alaskan Natives, the Center for Mental Health Research and Recovery, the Center for Interdisciplinary Health Workforce Studies, the NSF National Nanotechnology Research Center, the Center for Health and Safety Culture, the Extreme Gravity Institute, the Pollinator Health Center, the Center for Wildlife Health and Disease Ecology and the Engineering Education Research Center.
“I’m very proud that during my time we were able to support important initiatives for the arts and humanities like the Doig Center and the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences fund, which has provided important matching and seed money in those areas,” Reijo Pera said.
Reijo Pera earned her bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Wisconsin at Superior in 1983, her master’s in agriculture from Kansas State in 1987 and her doctorate from Cornell University in 1993.
Prior to coming to MSU, Reijo Pera was the director of Stanford University’s Center for Human Pluripotent Stem Cell Research and Education and the Center for Reproductive and Stem Cell Biology.
MSU will begin a national search for a new vice president of research immediately.
Story by MSU News Service
