Johns Hopkins Dean Appointed Provost at USC

The dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore has been named provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at USC, university officials have announced.

Lloyd Armstrong Jr., who is also a physics professor at Johns Hopkins and has been active on national research panels in physics, will take over the second-in-command job at USC by Aug. 1. He replaces Cornelius J. Pings, who left USC to become president of the Assn. of American Universities, an organization of the nation’s top research institutions.

In announcing Armstrong’s appointment, USC President Steven B. Sample said in a statement: “No appointment we make in this decade is more important than that of the provost.”

He praised Armstrong’s commitment to academic quality and said the new provost “knows how to build quality while balancing budgets.” USC, like many universities nationwide, is experiencing budget problems that some professors fear will lead to cutbacks in its academic offerings.

Armstrong, 52, earned a bachelor’s degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a doctorate at UC Berkeley. He joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 1968 and became dean in 1987. He chaired the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council committee on atomic and molecular sciences from 1985 to 1988.