DISTINGUISHED LEADER IN EDUCATION 2013
Dr. Lisa S. Coico
President, The City College of NY
Dr. Lisa S. Coico, a nationally prominent educator and researcher in microbiology and immunology and former Provost and Executive Vice President of Academic Affairs and Professor of Surgery at Temple University, is the 12th President of The City College of New York. A native of Brooklyn, President S. Coico earned a B.S. with honors in biology from Brooklyn College of the City University of New York in 1976, and is the first CUNY alumna to serve as president of City College, founded in 1847 as New York City’s first public institution of higher education, The Free Academy.
President S. Coico served as executive director of the Tri-Institutional Research Program, a $160-million research consortium of Cornell University, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Rockefeller University. She has also held senior academic and administrative leadership positions at Cornell’s Joan and Sanford I. Weill Medical College in New York City, including vice provost for medical and external affairs, senior associate dean for research, division chief of surgical research, and professorships in microbiology in surgery, microbiology in dermatology, and public health.
As Temple’s provost, President S. Coico was responsible for 17 schools and colleges, including campuses in Tokyo and Rome; its undergraduate, graduate and professional programs, and a budget of more than $600 million. After an 18-month collaborative process, she launched an academic strategic plan for the university and initiated an innovative general education curriculum that was hailed by “The Chronicle of Higher Education.”
Before joining Temple University, President S. Coico was the Rebecca Q. and James C. Morgan Dean of the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University, a college with a $70-million budget, more than 1,400 students, and a $23-million annual research program. She successfully planned and secured $39 million for the design and construction of a state-of-the-art laboratory building for the College, established interdisciplinary programs in areas such as psychology and law, and global health and nutrition.
Her recent professional appointments have included service as a member of the NIH’s National Advisory General Medical Sciences Council, as well as a chair of the NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences Special Emphasis Panel on trauma training and the Special Emphasis Panel of the NIH’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. President S. Coico also was a member of the Association of American Medical Colleges’ Task Force on Research Institutes and Centers, and she is past president of the International Society for Analytical Cytology. She is currently a Health Research Advisory Committee Member for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, as appointed by the Governor of Pennsylvania. She is also a member of the Board of Managers of The Philadelphia Foundation.
President S. Coico currently researches alcohol and drug abuse prevention among traditional college-aged students. Recent publications include “Impact of an Online Alcohol Education Course on Behavior and Harm for Incoming First-Year College Students: Short-Term Evaluation of a Randomized Trial” in the Journal of American College Health. #
