Lance Collins, vice president of the greater Washington, D.C., area for Virginia Tech, has announced he will retire in January after a nearly four-decade-long career in higher education.
Dr. Collins, a professor of mechanical engineering, joined Virginia Tech in 2020 as the founding executive director and vice president of the university’s Innovation Campus in Alexandria, Virginia. During his tenure, he helped establish the campus’s Academic Building One and the Institute for Advanced Computing.
“Joining Virginia Tech in August 2020 to build a campus from the ground up, in the midst of a pandemic, was arguably the greatest challenge I have ever faced,” said Dr. Collins. “I am deeply grateful to everyone who joined this effort, but especially to those who came in the early days and believed in a fledgling vision. Your faith, commitment, and willingness to take a chance on something that did not yet exist made the seemingly impossible possible.”
Before coming to Virginia Tech, Dr. Collins served 10 years as the Joseph Silbert Dean of Engineering at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He was the first African American dean at Cornell and a key member of the leadership team that successfully bid to partner with New York City to build Cornell Tech, which opened its Roosevelt Island campus in 2017. Before becoming dean in 2010, Dr. Collins served as the S. C. Thomas Sze Director of the Sibley School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering at Cornell. Prior to joining the Cornell faculty in 2002, he taught at Pennsylvania State University.
Dr. Collins is an honors graduate of Princeton University in New Jersey. He earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.
