Brock University’s Vice-President Research announced March 17 that he is wrapping up his term this summer.

“I have now been at Brock University for almost five years,” says Gary Libben. “From the outset, I have been made to feel welcome as a member of the Brock community and as a member of the Niagara community.”

“I am very grateful for this and look forward to many more years of working here together with students and colleagues.”

Libben’s five-year term as VPR officially ends on June 30. He will stay on for an additional month to ensure a smooth transition over the summer.

I consider it to be a privilege to be a university professor and to have the opportunity to work with students to advance their knowledge, to build understanding, and, indeed, to learn from them.

“Dr. Libben has made remarkable progress in going further to develop a culture of research at Brock,” says Brock University President Jack Lightstone.

“I will miss him as a senior administration colleague, but am so pleased he will remain our academic colleague.”

Libben, who is a professor in the Department of Applied Linguistics and cross-appointed to the Department of Psychology, says he is looking forward to researching and teaching in his areas of expertise.

“I consider it to be a privilege to be a university professor and to have the opportunity to work with students to advance their knowledge, to build understanding, and, indeed, to learn from them,” he says.

Libben is a psycholinguist and neurolinguist who develops new models and research methods to advance understanding of how words are represented in the mind and brain.

He took up his VPR position at Brock University on Aug. 1, 2011, having come from the University of Calgary, where he was Associate Vice-President (Research).

During his five years as Brock’s VPR, Libben has worked to build a “culture of research leadership” in which transdisciplinary research, research intensiveness and connections with the community would thrive.

He also led efforts to recognize and celebrate research accomplishments as a way of encouraging researchers in their work.

In addition to pursuing his research and teaching, Libben will be continuing his role as editor of the journal The Mental Lexicon and his new role as senior editor for psycholinguistics of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics.

Libben became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2008. He is a former president of the Canadian Linguistics Association.

He is co-founder of The Mental Lexicon Journal, and was the founding director of the University of Alberta’s Centre for Comparative Psycholinguistics. He has also been director of Words in the Mind, Words in the Brain, a Major Collaborative Research Initiative Project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.