Dean Vicki Colvin 

Dr. Vicki Colvin joined LSU in 2024 as dean of the LSU College of Engineering and the Bert S. Turner Chair. A native of Baton Rouge, she earned her bachelor’s degree in chemistry and physics from Stanford University in 1988 and her PhD in chemistry from the University of California-Berkeley in 1994.

Previously, Colvin served as the Victor Kreible Professor of Chemistry and Engineering at Brown University and director of its Biomedical Engineering program. Her research explores how nanoscale materials interact with the environment and living systems. Examples of technologies developed by her research group there include electromagnetically active particles in treating diseases and the use of perpetual antioxidants for mediating the foreign body response to implanted medical devices.

Colvin has published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers, holds five patents, and is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She has received numerous awards, including the 2015 Sustainable Nanotechnology Award, the Phi Beta Kappa teaching award from Rice University, and associate editorship for the American Chemical Society (ACS) journal Nano Letters.

Colvin’s leadership roles include decades-long directorship of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology (CBEN); founding director of Rice’s Shared Equipment Authority; vice provost for research (Rice); provost (Brown); and most recently, founding director of Brown’s new Institute for Biology, Engineering, and Medicine.