Kevin Belfield Appointed as NJIT’s Dean of College of Science and Liberal Arts

On Aug 15, 2014

Kevin D. Belfield, Ph.D., has been named as NJIT’s Dean of College of Science and Liberal Arts, effective Nov. 1, 2014. Scientist, educator and researcher, Belfield currently serves as Pegasus Professor and Chair of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Central Florida. Before this, Belfield served as the department’s graduate coordinator and developed a highly interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in chemistry. He also played a significant role in creating interdisciplinary graduate programs in materials science and engineering and bimolecular sciences. Belfield received a B.S. degree in chemistry from Rochester Institute of Technology in 1982 and the Ph.D. degree in chemistry from Syracuse University in 1988. He then worked as a senior chemist at Ciba-Geigy before performing postdoctoral research at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry and at Harvard University. Subsequently, he was a member of the faculty at the University of Detroit Mercy and graduate coordinator.

Belfield served as PI or co-PI on over 30 grants from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council, the Petroleum Research Foundation of the American Chemical Society, The Research Corporation, U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, U.S. Civilian Research and Development Foundation, Academy of Applied Science, Arnold & Mabel Beckman Foundation, and James and Ester King Biomedical Research Foundation. In addition, he served as PI on over 15 grants and contracts from industrial sources, including Lockheed Martin, Siemens, Alcon, Covidien, Ford Motor Company, PetroAlgae, MacDermid, Ophthonix, Sensera, Xenon and Triton Systems. Belfield helped develop the proposal for the $52 million Physical Sciences Building at Central Florida and was subsequently heavily involved with the building’s design and construction oversight. Belfield is a standing member of the National Institutes of Health’s Enabling Bioanalytical and Imaging Technologies study section and served as Chair of the Orlando Section of the American Chemical Society.

Belfield is a pioneer in two-photon absorbing materials, multiphoton photophysics and two-photon photochemistry. His research interests are in the area of multiphoton absorbing materials, ultrafast photophysics of organic molecules, two-photon photochemistry, in vivo and ex vivo two-photon fluorescence bioimaging, supramolecular chemistry, fluorescence-based sensors and bioimaging probes, photodynamic therapy agents, nanostructured functional organic and polymeric materials, and two-photon based 3D high density optical data storage. His scholarship is extensive in these areas with over 140 peer-reviewed journal articles. Belfield holds over a dozen U.S. patents and serves on the Editorial Advisory Boards of ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces, Journal of Fluorescence, and International Journal of Molecular Sciences. At Central Florida and Detroit Mercy, Belfield mentored 21 Ph.D. and 30 M.S. students. In 2013, Belfield was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

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