George Shields

Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences

George Shields joined Bucknell on July 1, 2010. His responsibilities include overseeing the College of Arts and Sciences, including the School of Management.

A national leader in undergraduate research, Shields has collaborated with over 100 undergraduates in meaningful projects in the fields of computational chemistry, structural biochemistry and science education. His most current research involves using computational methods to gain insights into biochemistry and environmental chemistry.

Since 1990, Shields has received more than $4 million in external research grants from many foundations and funding agencies, including the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health. He has published more than 70 scientific and six educational papers since 1983, including 45 scientific papers with 43 undergraduates working in his research group since 1991. View the group website at http://www.linux.bucknell.edu/shields/

Shields previously served as the founding dean of the College of Science and Technology at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, Ga., where he was also a professor of chemistry in the Department of Chemistry and Physics. Prior to that, Shields served as a professor of chemistry and chair of the department at Hamilton College, and in various faculty and administrative posts at Lake Forest College. Since 2000, Shields has also served as director of MERCURY, or the Molecular Education and Research Consortium in Undergraduate Computational Chemistry, a collaboration of 14 undergraduate research teams at 18 different institutions. The annual MERCURY conference is held at Bucknell each summer.

Shields received his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from the Georgia Institute of Technology. His postdoctoral research on protein-DNA interactions at Yale University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute was conducted in the laboratory of Professor Thomas Steitz, the 2009 Chemistry Nobel Laureate.