W. Mark Saltzman, an engineer and educator who has been part of the Yale faculty since 2002, has been appointed the next head of Jonathan Edwards College, Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis announced in a message to the community on March 27.
Saltzman, who has been serving as interim head of the college, also served as the head of JE from 2016 to 2022.
College heads serve as the chief administrative officer and presiding faculty member within the residential colleges, and help nurture the social, cultural, and educational life there, a role that has become a cherished Yale tradition.
Saltzman will begin a three-year term at Jonathan Edwards College on July 1.
“It is such a joy for me to return to the JE community, which has a long history of scholarship, camaraderie, artistry, and friendship,” Saltzman said. “I am honored and delighted to be invited to return to the college with my family.”
Saltzman, the Goizueta Foundation Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science (SEAS), also has appointments in chemical engineering (at SEAS) and in cellular and molecular physiology, and dermatology, at Yale School of Medicine (YSM).
In 2003, he was named the founding chair of Yale’s Department of Biomedical Engineering, in SEAS, a role he served until 2015. His research work over the past 20 years has been conducted in collaboration with physician-scientists at YSM.
“Professor Saltzman is a dedicated and acclaimed teacher whose courses examine topics from physiological systems and the physiology of health to the engineering of drug delivery,” Lewis wrote.
In 2009, he was awarded Yale’s Sheffield Teaching Prize for excellence in the classroom. His course on the “Frontiers of Biomedical Engineering” is available around the world through the online Open Yale Courses program.
In addition to his teaching, Saltzman has been recognized widely for his excellence in research. He was named a fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society in 2010, a member of the Connecticut Academy of Science & Engineering in 2012, and a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors in 2013. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2014 and the National Academy of Engineering in 2018. He has delivered over 300 invited lectures throughout the world, written three textbooks, and published nearly 400 scientific papers.
“Joining Professor Saltzman,” Lewis wrote, “are his wife, Associate Head Christina Pavlak, an associate professor of education at Quinnipiac University and director of the Master of Arts in Teaching program; their 12-year-old daughter, Noa, who has many talents in crafting and the circus arts (particularly diabolo); their 6-year-old daughter Willa, who took her first steps in this dining hall and now is a talented gymnast; and a mostly Labrador retriever — and very nervous soul — named Lulu.”
Pavlak, like her husband, has a love of the classroom, Lewis added. She spent many years as a bilingual teacher in an elementary school in Santa Fe, New Mexico, before returning to the Northeast to earn advanced degrees in education from Columbia University and Boston College.
“Please join me in welcoming Professor Saltzman, Associate Head Pavlak, Noa, Willa, and Lulu back to the Jonathan Edwards community,” Lewis wrote in his message.
