Melanie Loots

Melanie Loots is the Senior Executive Associate Vice Chancellor for Research & Innovation at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is responsible for policy development, strategic and tactical planning, implementation of the University Policy on Conflicts of Commitment and Interest on the UIUC campus, and is the liaison to several cross-disciplinary campus units.

Melanie has served on federal panels and committees, including National Science Foundation review panels, NASA’s SEDAC user working group, the National Research Council Committee for CODATA, and NSF’s Advisory Committee for the Office of International Science and Engineering, as well as organizational and program committees for technical conferences and the board of directors of the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computing. From 1991-2000, she directed the Applications Division of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Prior to joining the University of Illinois in 1989, she worked in drug discovery and information services at E. R. Squibb and Sons, a pharmaceutical company in New Jersey. Before moving into the pharmaceutical industry, Melanie received her Ph.D. in organometallic chemistry from Princeton in 1979, working with Professor Jeffrey Schwartz, and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Chicago, working with Professor Jack Halpern.