Dr. Anthony Koppers serves as the Associate Vice President for Research Advancement and Strategy at Oregon State University (OSU) and is leading the Office of Research Advancement (ORA). In these roles he focuses on research development to make OSU more competitive in securing large and complex proposals, on positioning OSU according to its research strengths by starting new strategic initiatives, and on brokering partnerships that inspire transdisciplinary science solutions to regional and global challenges.

Dr. Koppers previously served as the Associate Dean for Research in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences (CEOAS) from 2019 to 2022. As an Associate Dean, he oversaw the recovery and rebuilding of Burt 2 Hall following the devastating fire in 2018, he guided the college in keeping its large research enterprise highly productive during the COVID pandemic, and he started the upgrading project for the pier and dock in Newport that will host the new OSU research vessel Taani.

Dr. Koppers has a Ph.D. in the Earth Sciences and has been at OSU since 2007 as a faculty member in CEOAS. He has held several leadership roles in the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) that culminated in the 2050 Science Framework and underpins the future of scientific ocean drilling in the United States. As a CEOAS faculty member, he focuses on understanding large-scale geodynamic processes including the formation and behavior of mantle plumes and convective patterns in Earth’s interior. He is the director of a multi-user mass spectrometry facility at OSU that specializes in the age determination of geological materials, he is co-director of the largest NSF-funded marine sediment core repository in the nation, he is leading the development and maintenance of several online scientific data repositories, and he serves as one of five principal investigators on the $350M Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) project and oversees their petabyte scale cyberinfrastructure. He has published more than 110 peer-reviewed papers and has secured $45M in extramural funding as PI or co-PI from diverse sources.

His overall ambition is to develop a framework for sustained growth of the OSU Research Enterprise.