Interim Dean
223 Link Hall
jlross@syr.edu
Interim Dean Jennifer Ross an award-winning biophysicist studying the organization of the microtubule cytoskeleton and enzymes using high-resolution single-molecule imaging techniques. Ross has a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California Santa Barbara, where she was a member of their Materials Research Science and Engineering Center for her graduate work. Her research uses protein engineering to study intracellular organization from the single molecule to the collective and material scales. Her work has been recognized by several awards including the receiving the Margaret Oakley Dayhoff Award from the Biophysical Society, the Cottrell Scholar Award from Research Corporation for Science Advancement, and she is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Ross is an advocate of the teacher-scholar model for faculty creating pathways and opportunities for students from the classroom to the laboratory. She has mentored over 100 undergraduate students in her lab and has 23 peer-reviewed publications with a total of 40 undergraduate co-authors. Students in the Ross Lab are trained in a week-long BioBootCamp offered at least once per year to train students in basic wet lab, protein purification and quality control, microscopy, and quantitative analysis. As a Cottrell Scholar, she has also developed a hands-on experiential course in optics aimed at life science and physical science students where student build a light microscope to understand classical optics. This course has been picked up by several training facilities around the world including at the Marine Biology Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA and the Bangalore Microscopy Course at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India.
Ross has a track record to leadership for both her scientific community and at Syracuse University. She has served as secretary/treasurer and chair of the Division of Biological Physics at the Biophysical Society, has been a Council Member for both the Biophysical Society and is currently a council member at the American Physical Society, is the appointed chair for the 2027 March Meeting (the entire meeting), and recently organized the 2025 Soft Condensed Matter Gordon Research Conference. At Syracuse, she served as the Physics Department chair from 2020 – 2024 and Associate Dean for Creativity, Scholarship, and Research in the College of Arts and Sciences from January – October of 2025. She was appointed as interim dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science starting November 1, 2025.