Denis Wirtz is the vice provost for research and Theophilus Halley Smoot Professor of Engineering Science at Johns Hopkins University. He is an expert in the molecular and biophysical mechanisms of cell motility and adhesion and nuclear dynamics in health and disease. Wirtz was the first to establish how a three-dimensional environment fundamentally affects the way cancer cells migrate, providing more biologically and medically relevant information than two-dimensional studies. He also pioneered the technique of particle-tracking microrheology to probe the rheological properties of complex fluids and living cells and tissues. He is a professor in the Departments of Chemical Engineering & Biomolecular Engineering and Materials Science & Engineering in the Whiting School of Engineering, and in the Departments of Oncology and Pathology in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Wirtz was named vice provost for research in February 2014, charged with directing the university's $2.24 billion research enterprise, implementing institutional research compliance, expanding research development, and producing and managing cross-divisional research initiatives, such as the Johns Hopkins Catalyst and Discovery Awards program, the President's Frontier Award program, and the Bloomberg Distinguished Professorships, which were established as part of a $350 million gift by Michael Bloomberg. Biography Wirtz was born in the Ixelles municipality of Brussels, Belgium. He is fluent in English and French, and became a U.S. citizen in 2007. Wirtz earned a physics engineering degree at the Ecole Polytechnique of the Université libre de Bruxelles in 1988. With a Hoover Fellowship from the Belgian American Educational Foundation (BAEF), he earned an M.S. and Ph.D in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University, working in polymer physics. He was then granted a fellowship through the European Union’s Human Capital and Mobility program to conduct postdoctoral research at the Ecole Supérieure de Physique et Chimie Industrielles (ESPCI) in Paris, France. Wirtz joined the faculty of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Johns Hopkins University in 1994 and was promoted to the rank of full professor in 2003. In 2009, he was selected to be the Theophilus Halley Smoot Professor of Engineering Science with secondary appointments in the departments of Materials Science and Engineering, Pathology and Oncology, where he collaborates with fellow researchers in the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center. Upon his appointment as the Theophilius Halley Smoot Professor of Engineering Physics, Dr. Nicholas Jones, former dean of the Whiting School of Engineering, stated "Throughout his time at Johns Hopkins, Denis has