- Senior Vice President for Research
"Penn State is at an inflexion point, as is the nation and the world. I am excited to have the opportunity to be a fierce advocate for Penn State Research during a time of immense change. Our research mission is urgent and vital: knowledge creation, dissemination and implementation will be key determinants of human wellbeing in the rest of this century."
Andrew Read is the senior vice president for research at The Pennsylvania State University. In his role, he oversees the research of twelve academic colleges, seven interdisciplinary research institutes, the Applied Research Lab, which is a university affiliated research center for the Navy, and offices for sponsored programs, research protections, industry partnerships, technology transfer, innovation, economic development, and commercialization.
Read, who is the Evan Pugh University Professor of Biology and Entomology and the Eberly Professor of Biotechnology, led the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences beginning in 2019. In 2020, he mobilized researchers from across Penn State to address the COVID-19 pandemic.
Read spearheaded a rapid-response internal call-for-proposals to address what was then an emerging outbreak, which led to significant investments of external funding to Penn State and to several corporate partnerships to advance technologies to market.
Read has supported the growth of interdisciplinary research across the life sciences, including regenerative engineering, neuroscience, gerontology, microbiomes and nutritional sciences and relaunched the Huck Innovative and Transformative Seed Fund (HITS), which supports, at scale, bold proposals too risky for traditional funders.
His research in evolutionary microbiology, particularly the evolution of antimicrobial drug resistance, vaccine escape and pathogen virulence, is focused on mitigating pathogen evolution that harms human well-being. He has taught ecology, evolution, microbiology and statistics. He has authored more than 250 peer-reviewed publications, 30 book chapters and four edited volumes, and has been elected to fellowships from the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Microbiology, the Royal Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Originally from New Zealand, he earned a doctoral degree in evolutionary biology at the University of Oxford. He held various fellowships at Oxford and then at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, where he became Chair of Natural History. In 2007, he joined the faculty of the departments of biology and entomology at Penn State. He directed Penn State’s Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics from 2010 until 2018.