President Tim Sands reappointed to serve on Innovation and Entrepreneurship Investment Authority
Tim Sands, Virginia Tech's 16th president, was recently reappointed to Virginia's Innovation and Entrepreneurship Investment Authority.
Sands was reappointed to serve an additional two-year term by Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam. The Innovation and Entrepreneurship Investment Authority was formed in 2009 by then-Gov. Tim Kaine.
The authority's primary charge is to accelerate the next generation of technology and technology companies to make Virginia an attractive business location.
Sands became Virginia Tech's 16th president in 2014. As president, he has engaged the university community in a visionary plan to advance Virginia Tech’s role as a global land-grant institution, confronting the commonwealth’s, the country’s, and the world’s most challenging problems.
The initiative, called “Beyond Boundaries,” seeks to define Virginia Tech’s role a generation into the future and align the educational experience with the needs and opportunities that will be created by changing world economies and the evolving landscape of higher education.
He also launched and led InclusiveVT, an initiative to provide leadership, collaboration, guidance, and resources to support and accelerate the implementation of inclusion and diversity goals throughout the university community.
InclusiveVT supports the imperative of inclusion and diversity as key components of a university ecosystem rich in opportunities for experiential learning, cross-disciplinary engagement, and the development of cultural awareness and empathy.
Sands’ vision for Virginia Tech embraces the university’s heritage of service and community and its motto, Ut Prosim (That I May Serve). Virginia Tech students will graduate with disciplinary mastery, technology literacy, cultural competency, resilience, empathy for others, and the passions and strengths needed for a life and career of impactful service to humanity.
Before coming to Virginia Tech, Sands served as executive vice president for academic affairs and provost of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. He was acting president during the summer and fall of 2012. Sands is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.
He earned a bachelor's degree with highest honors in engineering physics and a master's degree and doctorate in materials science from the University of California, Berkeley. He joined the Purdue faculty in 2002 as the Basil S. Turner Professor of Engineering in the schools of Materials Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering. Prior to becoming provost, he served as the Mary Jo and Robert L. Kirk Director of the Birck Nanotechnology Center in Purdue's Discovery Park.
From 1993 to 2002, Sands was a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and before that, he performed research and directed research groups at Bell Communications Research (Bellcore) in Red Bank, New Jersey.
