President Rex E. Lee has announced the appointment of two chairmen at Brigham Young University.
Jay Fox is the new chairman of the English department, replacing Neal Lambert who will take an academic leave of absence and then return to the English faculty. Dorian M. Hatch will head the department of physics and astronomy, taking over from Daniel L. Decker, who is returning to full-time teaching and research.Fox completed a Ph.D. in English from Purdue University in 1971. He subsequently joined the English faculty at BYU-Hawaii, where he served as English department chairman, dean, university vice president and acting president.
He joined the BYU English department in 1980, where he has been an associate chairman, director of the BYU Center for the Study of Christian Values in Literature and editor of Literature and Belief, the center's journal.
A professional writing consultant, Fox has worked with many governmental, commercial and educational clients, including the LDS Church's Correlation Department, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Department of Energy and Bureau of Reclamation, Frito-Lay, Shell Oil and several Utah law enforcement and municipal agencies. He also has conducted writing workshops at BYU and BYU-Hawaii and heads BYU's Advanced Writing Committee.
In 1984, Fox was one of 25 humanities instructors from throughout the United States selected to participate in a Princeton University seminar sponsored by a Woodrow Wilson Foundation Grant. He has written and edited scholarly papers that have appeared in national and international professional journals.
Hatch, a graduate of Utah State University, received both his B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook. He subsequently served as an assistant professor at SUNY-Farmingdale before joining the BYU faculty in 1968.
He has spent sabbatical leaves studying at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the University of Delaware, and was a visiting faculty member at San Diego State University and the University of Washington.
In 1992, Hatch was awarded a Karl G. Maeser Research and Creative Arts Award, one of the university's top faculty honors. His research specialty is theoretical condensed matter physics.
Hatch has published dozens of research and review articles in major professional journals and given many presentations at national and international scientific conferences, including an International Colloquium on Group Theoretical Methods in Physics conducted in Moscow in 1990.