Eric Isaacs Named Next RCSA President
Eric D. Isaacs, president of the Carnegie Institute for Science from 2018 to 2024, has been selected as the next president and CEO of the Research Corporation for Science Advancement following a nearly year-long national search process.
Isaacs will assume his new role on July 1 upon the retirement of Daniel Linzer, the former provost of Northwestern University who has led RCSA since 2017.
“Eric is a national leader in research, having deep connections within the scientific community,” said RCSA Board of Directors Chair Peter K. Dorhout. “We’re excited about the experience he brings to the partnerships and community building that are the heart of the mission and strategic priorities of RCSA.”
During Isaacs’ tenure at Carnegie, he led the strategic reorganization of the 120-year-old independent research institution to strengthen its interdisciplinary research capabilities. He developed a formal research partnership with Caltech that included plans for a new state-of-the-art research facility in Pasadena and served on the board of the Giant Magellan Telescope as a founding member of the international coalition to build the 25-meter instrument at Carnegie’s Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. Previously, as Executive Vice President for Research, Innovation and National Laboratories at the University of Chicago, he oversaw more than $1.5 billion in sponsored research, including forefront science and engineering at the University of Chicago Medical Center, Argonne National Laboratory, Fermilab, and the Marine Biological Laboratory. He also served as the university’s provost, and director of the Argonne National Laboratory.
"Now more than ever, we need independent voices to advocate for basic science," Isaacs said. "RCSA has a long and distinguished record of advancing transformational science and creating new career opportunities for teacher-scholars across the U.S. and Canada, and I am honored to join their team."
Isaacs received his B.A. in Physics from Beloit College, his Ph.D. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Bell Laboratories. His scientific interests range from astrophysics to condensed matter physics to ecogenomics and energy technologies. As an experimental physicist, he studied novel electronic and magnetic materials with a focus on creating images of novel phenomena in reciprocal and real space at the nanoscale. He developed several modern synchrotron-based X-ray scattering techniques, including magnetic X-ray diffraction, inelastic X-ray scattering, X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy, and hard X-ray nanoprobe.
He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors and the American Physical Society.
Isaacs will be relocating to Tucson with his wife, Linda F. Goldwyn, an attorney and writer.
