Dr. Gene D. Block

Chancellor,
University of California, Los Angeles

Dr. Gene Block became chancellor of UCLA on August 1, 2007, taking the helm of a world-class institution comprising 37,000 students and 27,000 faculty and staff, with an annual budget of $3.8 billion. As chief executive officer, he oversees all aspects of the university’s three-part mission of education, research and service. A champion of public universities, Chancellor Block has called for UCLA to deepen its engagement with Los Angeles, a city that offers a microcosm of the global community, and to increase access for students from underrepresented populations. An advocate of interdisciplinary scholarship, he emphasizes broad-based, campus-wide planning. Returning to the West Coast after 29 years at the University of Virginia, Chancellor Block holds UCLA faculty appointments in psychiatry and bio-behavioral sciences in the David Geffen School of Medicine and in physiological science in the College of Letters and Science. A fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he heads a research laboratory on campus that is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). His academic specialization, circadian biology, deals with the functioning of 24-hour rhythms in higher organisms (See Scholarship). Previously, Dr. Block served as vice president and provost of the University of Virginia, where he held the Alumni Council Thomas Jefferson Professorship in Biology and directed the National Science Foundation’s Science and Technology Center for Biological Timing. He also headed an NIH graduate training program aimed at increasing the number of scientists from underrepresented groups. Chancellor Block joined the faculty of the University of Virginia in 1978. He served as the university’s vice provost for research from 1993 to 1998 and then as vice president for research and public service until his appointment as vice president and provost in 2001. In 1998, he received the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Outstanding Public Service Award for his work with Virginia’s business community. A native New Yorker, Chancellor Block holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Stanford University and a master’s and Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Oregon. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford, studying with Colin Pittendrigh, “the father of biological timing,” and Donald Kennedy, who later served as president of Stanford. The inventor of a number of devices, Chancellor Block holds a patent for a non-contact respiratory monitor for the prevention of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. He is an avid collector of vacuum-tube radios and has restored a number of high-performance cars. Chancellor Block and his wife, Carol, have two children.