Art + Science Conversation: Walter E. Massey and Stephen Beal

 

Walter E. Massey, PhD, is the president of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and president emeritus of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, having served as president there from 1995 to 2007. Immediately prior to that post, Dr. Massey was provost and senior vice president for academic affairs of the University of California system. In that role he oversaw three national Department of Energy laboratories. A prominent physicist, Dr.

Massey served as director of the Argonne National Laboratory from 1979 to 1984 and was professor of physics and vice president of research at the University of Chicago from 1979 to 1991. He also served as director of the National Science Foundation from 1991 to 1993, appointed by former President George H.W. Bush. Throughout his academic career, Dr. Massey has been an advocate for issues surrounding minority students and education. He developed and directed the Inner City Teachers of Science Program while at Brown University, where college students studying education became tutors and mentors in urban classrooms. He was also a founding trustee of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy.

 

 

Stephen Beal is a professor of painting and drawing, as well as the current president of the California College of the Arts. In addition to his academic career, Beal is a practicing artist, and his work has been exhibited in the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, and throughout the Midwest. He serves on the board of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and is board president of the internationally renowned Creative Growth Art Center

in Oakland, which fosters and promotes the art of people with physical, developmental, and emotional disabilities.