College of Arts & Sciences names new Senior Associate Dean 

Andrew Bass, professor of neurobiology and behavior, has been named Senior Associate Dean overseeing math and sciences for the College of Arts & Sciences. He will assume the role on Jan. 1, when the term ends of Barbara Baird, Horace White Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. 

Bass served as chair of the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior from 1994-99 and co-chair from 2001-02, and was chair of the Life Sciences Advisory Council from 2004-07. He served as Cornell’s Senior Associate Vice Provost for Research from 2013-17 and as Associate Vice Provost for Research from 2010-13, helping to plan and coordinate research across the university, especially in the life sciences that engage faculty, staff and students across multiple colleges and research units.

A behavioral and evolutionary neuroscientist, Bass’ research strives to explain how variation in vertebrate brain organization leads to different behavioral phenotypes both within and between species. Informed by studies of animals behaving in their native habitats, his research uses fishes as model systems to explain how animals generate acoustic communication signals and how the auditory system comes to be tuned to those signals. His work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation during the past 30 years.

Bass received a BA in biology from Case Western Reserve University in 1973, and an MS in 1977 and a PhD in 1979, both in zoology from the University of Michigan. The author of nearly 200 scientific papers in journals including Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Current Biology, he is recently the lead editor, with Joseph Sisneros, Richard Fay and Arthur Popper, of “Hearing and Hormones” (2016), an examination of the relationship of hearing, hormones and reproduction.