Wayne State University’s vice president for research & innovation announces new leadership appointments

DETROIT - Dr. Ezemenari M. Obasi, vice president for research & innovation at Wayne State University is pleased to announce the appointments of two new positions in the Division of Research & Innovation.

Dr. Matthew J. Allen has been appointed assistant vice president for research & innovation. In this role, Dr. Allen will manage the Grand Challenges rollout and execution, support research centers and institutes with strategic planning and development, lead campus engagement for strategic initiatives and federal funding challenges and serve as a thought leader and backup to the vice president for research & innovation.

Dr. Allen earned a B.S. in chemistry (honors) with a minor in mathematics from Purdue University, during which time he was also an intern at Eli Lilly and Company. He earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology while on a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship. He was a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying chemical biology prior to joining WSU as an assistant professor in 2008.

Dr. Allen has served as chair of the Department of Chemistry in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences since 2016, and during his leadership, the department increased in annual research expenditures from external sources nearly every year, with 2024 expenditures roughly double 2016 expenditures, resulting in an increase in the National Science Foundation research rankings for the Department of Chemistry from 100^th in 2016 to 54^th in 2024. He will continue serving as the chair of chemistry.

Dr. Jessica Back has been appointed director of the Division of Research & Innovation research cores. In this role, Dr. Back willprovide institutional support and oversee daily operations and direction of Wayne State's research core facilities. In addition, she will assist in aligning technology platform resources with strategic programmatic areas for the university, ensure that enabling technologies provided through research core resources are operating with best practice considerations, and establish mechanisms for core development and transitions with respect to evolving external resources and needs. She will also lead the streamlining of research core resources, enforce federal funding guidelines for core facilities, and develop a coordinated resource for research informatics.

Dr. Back earned a B.S. in biochemistry from Ohio Northern University. She earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Wayne State University studying DNA carcinogenesis and repair. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Wayne State University School of Medicine studying DNA vaccines and tumor immunology prior to joining the university in 2010.

Dr. Back is the director of the Microscopy, Imaging, and Cytometry Resources Core at Wayne State and the Karmanos Cancer Institute. She previously served as its associate director for 15 years. She has over 17 years of imaging and cytometry experience and holds Specialist in Cytometry certification from the American Society of Clinical Pathologists Board of Certification.

"I am pleased to have Drs. Allen and Back join our leadership team in the Division of Research & Innovation," said Dr. Ezemenari M. Obasi, vice president for research & innovation at Wayne State. "Dr. Allen will be key in helping us guide our Grand Challenges initiative that aims to solidify the university's commitment to solving society's most urgent challenges through pioneering research, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and purpose-driven education. Dr. Back will play an instrumental role in coordinating core activities that will align with the university's research mission, optimize resource use, ensure ethical standards, and promote use of the cores to enhance collaboration among researchers - ultimately driving scientific discovery at Wayne State."

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Wayne State University is one of the nation's pre-eminent public research universities in an urban setting. Through its multidisciplinary approach to research and education, and its ongoing collaboration with government, industry and other institutions, the university seeks to enhance economic growth and improve the quality of life in the city of Detroit, state of Michigan and throughout the world. For more information about research at Wayne State University, visit research.wayne.edu .