Hall of Fame Member Biographies

Frank Waxman

Dr. Frank Waxman, currently serves as the Director of the Oklahoma Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) for the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, and as a Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. Waxman’s visionary leadership and determination has impacted and improved student education and faculty research at community colleges, four-year universities, and comprehensive universities across Oklahoma. Waxman has obtained and administered over $50 million in grants for his own research as well as to improve Oklahoma’s competitiveness for research grants. He has ensured that minority groups that are traditionally under-represented in scientific research have benefitted from the opportunities he has brought to the state. Waxman’s leadership in curriculum reform and research has crossed boundaries at the state level and created relationships between students, faculty, and administrators and between institutions. His research on the clearance of immune complexes from circulation is a bench-mark study in the discipline of Immunology that is published in many medical textbooks. He was a co-founder of a biotech company that became listed on the NASDAQ. As Vice-President of Research at the University for Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Waxman played a leadership role in establishing policies and procedures for developing intellectual property and for engaging more faculty in the pursuit of patent protection for emerging technologies. He facilitated the grant application process and increased surveillance on grant compliance. As the principal investigator on Oklahoma’s NSF EPSCoR grant, he is leading efforts to improve competitiveness in disciplines ranging from nanotechnology to plant virus biodiversity and ecology. As the principal investigator on the Oklahoma NIH IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE) grant, Waxman is instrumental in helping build capacity for conducting biomedical research by increasing the number of NIH-funded investigators and the success rate for NIH applications from Oklahoma institutions. The project targets four major initiatives: to provide an alliance between Oklahoma’s graduate and undergraduate institutions, to develop infrastructure in targeted areas, to develop a more interdisciplinary undergraduate science curriculum, and to provide a solid foundation for retaining existing investigators and recruiting new biomedical scientists. Waxman has helped to increase the opportunities for Oklahoma students on all levels to experience the excitement of science.