New Senate chair bridges south, north campus

By Cynthia Lee

Vivek Shetty

Although a denizen of South Campus, Vivek Shetty, a professor of oral and maxillofacial surgery at the School of Dentistry, personally knows UCLA as a one-of-a-kind community of exceptional scholars north and south of Bruin Plaza.

A voracious reader, architecture buff and lover of art, Shetty is as much at home in Powell Library, where he goes for inspiration, as he is in the Center for the Health Sciences. His research focus, integrating mental health and substance abuse services into the management of individuals with assault-related facial injuries, takes him from the dental school into the realm of psychologists and social workers.

Shetty’s engagement with the entire campus has fostered in him a need to give back as the new chair of the Academic Senate.

“I relish UCLA’s distinctive integration of the professional disciplines with the liberal arts and humanities faculties and consider it a privilege to lead our distinguished faculty,” said Shetty in his Murphy Hall office. “Through my service on various Senate committees, I have acquired a deepened appreciation for the individual contributions our faculty make toward a purposeful culture of discovery, leadership, diversity, community and excellence.”

Shetty sees for now as an immediate issue before the Senate the protection of academic freedom against the attacks of animal-rights terrorists. “Discovery takes place at the frontiers of knowledge, and the process can be unsettling to some,” he said. “The scholarship of discovery can only flourish in an environment of openness and free exchange of information. A great research institution cannot allow discovery to be defined and dictated by extremist fringes. ... Our responsibility is to provide an open environment where scholarship can flourish.”

The faculty is working very closely with administrators to devise a concerted response to the problem. “Everything Chancellor Abrams has said in this regard has resonated with the faculty. We are behind him 100%,” Shetty said.

The faculty leader got his D.D.S. degree from Bombay University and a Dr.Med.Dent. from the University of Regensburg in Germany before training at Massachusetts General Hospital and UCLA. For now, he is hard at work being what he calls “an academic pentathlete.”

“We do research, we teach students, we treat patients and we are always asked to take on administrative tasks,” he said. “But probably the most important thing, especially for me, is to go home and be a husband and father” to his wife, Christina, and three children, ages 7 to 11. “The real challenge is to always keep everything in balance.”