By Cecelia Fielding
President Merrill J. Bateman has announced the appointment of three new department chairs.
Bruce A. Roundy
Erin D. Bigler is the new chair of the Department of Psychology, replacing David B. Stimpson. George S. Tate will chair the Department of Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature, taking over from John F. Hall. Bruce A. Roundy will replace Bill M. Hess as chair of the Department of Botany and Range Science. Stimpson, Hall, and Hess will all return to full-time teaching and research.
Bigler, a licensed psychologist since 1975, co-directs the clinical neuropsychology subspecialty training at BYU. He is a former professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Texas at Austin and director of neuropsychology at the Austin Neurological Clinic and the Austin State Hospital.
A widely published author and editor, Bigler directs a large ongoing research study on traumatic brain injury at LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City and is one of the collaborators in the Cache County Memory Study on Alzheimer’s Disease.
Tate, a BYU graduate, received a PhD in medieval studies at Cornell University in 1974. He was a Fulbright Fellow to Iceland and a Marshall Fellow to Denmark and served as secretary/treasurer for the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study from 1992–96.
George S. Tate
He has been an associate dean of General Education and Honors, was a Karl G. Maeser General Education Professor, and presented the P.A. Christensen Lecture in the College of Humanities in 1986. He has published many articles on medieval literature and culture, especially on Scandinavia.
Roundy, a graduate of the University of Nevada at Reno, received a PhD in range management at Utah State University in 1984. He joined the BYU faculty in 1994 after serving as an associate professor in the range management program at the University of Arizona.
His major research fields include revegetation, restoration of semi-arid lands, plant and soil responses to management practices, and soil and plant water relations.
Roundy is cooperating with Jaime Kaigel of Hebrew University in Jerusalem on a project to establish annual plants in the northern Negev Desert of Israel and is also working on several projects with the U.S. Forest Service Shrub Laboratory.
