The deanship of the College of Arts and Sciences in the University of Washington has been named in honor of Katherine Louise Gower Simpson and John Barclay Simpson. This endowment will enable the University to recruit and retain a distinguished Dean of the College, and to provide a stable source of discretionary funding for the Dean to advance interdisciplinary research and teaching. It is meant to support liberal arts education and research, as well as to recognize the great importance and value of the academic support staff to the endeavors of the University.
Katherine L. Simpson (1948-2022) was a Seattle native with long ties to the University of Washington. Her grandfather, Melville Harrison Hatch, was a longtime member of the Zoology faculty, specializing in the systematics of beetles of the Northwest. Katherine earned her B.A. in Art from the University and remained immersed in the arts for all of her life. She spent her career as a member of the University’s professional staff, initially in the Business School and later as the assistant to the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. She was widely recognized for her gracious manner, organizational skill, intelligence, and integrity. She made the University (and the College) a better place for its students, staff and faculty, and particularly for those deans who were fortunate enough to work with her.
John B. Simpson (1947- ) is a California native who began his professional career at the University of Washington in 1975 as Assistant Professor of Psychology. He earned his B.A. from the University of California at Santa Barbara and his graduate degrees from Northwestern University. He subsequently completed a postdoc under the Institute of Neurological Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. At the UW, his research focus was neuroendocrinology, and his teaching was more broadly in behavioral neuroscience. He was promoted to full professor in 1982, and he later served as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from 1994 to 1998. Subsequently he was the Executive Vice Chancellor at the University of California, Santa Cruz (1998-2003) and professor of psychology, and later the President of the University at Buffalo of the State University of New York (2004-2011) and professor of physiology and biophysics. His research work is highly cited, and he has been widely recognized for his creative academic leadership, particularly in times of difficulty.
Both Katherine and John recognized and promoted the value of a broad, interdisciplinary liberal arts education for students, for the state we live in, and indeed for the country and the world. This emphasis calls for creative and novel mixing of traditional disciplines, such as physiology with psychology, or history with art. John was a neuroscientist, a participant in an intellectual endeavor that borrows from many disciplines, all arrayed and employed to better understand how brains function. Katherine throughout her life was vitally interested in many forms of the arts, including dance, theater, music, and the visual arts. It is thus easily understood why the Simpsons endorse the types of interdisciplinary teaching and research that this endowment is directed to support.