CCNY Provost Tony Liss
Dr. Tony Liss, an internationally known physicist with research experience at the world’s highest energy accelerators, is The City College of New York’s new provost, CCNY President Vincent Boudreau announced. Liss had served as interim provost and senior vice president for academic affairs since March 2018.
In his permanent capacity, Liss continues to help lead the 172-year-old CCNY that is now classified in the “Doctoral Universities: High Research” category by The Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education ®. The Carnegie Classification has been the leading framework for recognizing and describing institutional diversity in U.S. higher education for the past four and a half decades.
Liss joined CCNY in fall 2013 as the first Martin and Michele Cohen Dean of Science. During his tenure as Dean, he reinforced the Division of Science’s five departments with dynamic research-active faculty; oversaw the opening of a new complex of science buildings on CCNY’s South Campus, and tirelessly championed faculty, student and staff success.
Before coming to CCNY, Liss was a professor of physics at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, whose faculty he joined in 1988.
Globally, Liss is renowned for his research in high-energy physics at the world’s highest energy accelerators, including the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF). He led groundbreaking research that resulted in the discovery of a new fundamental particle, the top quark, and he is a member of the ATLAS Collaboration that co-discovered the Higgs Boson in 2012.
A fellow of the American Physical Society, Liss earned his PhD in physics from the University of California – Berkeley in 1984 and holds a BA in physics from The Johns Hopkins University.
He is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences and serves on the boards of the New York Structural Biology Center and Science and Arts Engagement New York.
About The City College of New York
Since 1847, The City College of New York has provided a high quality and affordable education to generations of New Yorkers in a wide variety of disciplines. CCNY embraces its role at the forefront of social change. It is ranked #1 by the Harvard-based Opportunity Insights out of 369 selective public colleges in the United States on the overall mobility index. This measure reflects both access and outcomes, representing the likelihood that a student at CCNY can move up two or more income quintiles. In addition, the Center for World University Rankings places CCNY in the top 1.2% of universities worldwide in terms of academic excellence. More than 16,000 students pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in eight professional schools and divisions, driven by significant funded research, creativity and scholarship. CCNY is as diverse, dynamic and visionary as New York City itself. View CCNY Media Kit.