Dr. Charles Maris is the associate vice president for Research and Sponsored Projects at the University of West Georgia. He began working here in January 2013 and has years of experience working in universities’ grants and contracts offices.
Before his position at UWG, Dr. Maris was director of the grants and contracts office at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois.
Dr. Maris has lived all over the U.S. He was born in Manhattan, Kansas and grew up in San Antonio, Texas. He went to college and earned his undergraduate degrees in Psychology and Biology from the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) in Baltimore, Maryland and received his Ph.D. from Emory University in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics. He says Georgia is and always will be his home and enjoys living here with a red mutt he adopted several years ago named MACS.
Dr. Maris has worked in government, academia, and industry. Although he works in academia now, his first job was as a scientist with a research institute that performed domestic counterterrorism, and later with the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. He has also worked with a team that developed therapies for chronic viral infections and did a fellowship in the Johns Hopkins University Department of Oncology, where he tested the immunotherapies he developed in cancer models.
As far as accomplishments, Dr. Maris’ scientific research has been selected for funding by the American Cancer Society, the Cancer Research Institute, and the National Institutes of Health. He also worked as a co-author with a Nobel Laureate in is first scientific publication in Nature.
Eventually, Dr. Maris came back to work in academia because he missed working with motivated, intelligent faculty and students. He enjoys being around creative people that want to make the world a better place, and enjoys being surrounded by such individuals and supporting their careers.
He came to UWG for a number of reasons.
He values and wants to participate in the mission of public institutions. To him, UWG reminded him of his undergraduate institution UMBC and where that school was in the research life cycle 20 years ago. He enjoys facing the challenges here in that we are a major part of the regional economy, and especially that he is able to support the humanities and social sciences.
Dr. Maris is thrilled to be a part of supporting the careers of more than 400 faculty and impacting the educational experiences of thousands of students. He likes the trajectory, and knows UWG’s future is bright.
