Robert N Ubell

Robert Ubell is Vice President of Enterprise Learning at NYU Polytechnic Institute, where he heads the school’s e-learning unit, NYU-ePoly, ranked in the top 10 online learning engineering graduate programs by US News & World Report. It offers nearly 20 online graduate programs worldwide. Ubell also heads the school's executive education division, Enterprise Learning.

Ubell is the recipient of the highest honor given for individual achievement in digital education, the A. Frank Mayadas Leadership Award. In 2011, NYU-Poly's online graduate program in Cyber Security was awarded the Sloan-C prize as the best online program in the nation. Earlier, as Dean of Online Learning, he launched WebCampus at Stevens Institute of Technology, also recipient of a Sloan-C award as well as a series of other notable prizes for quality online education.  At Stevens, Ubell administered the school's graduate programs in Beijing, winner of yet another Sloan-C award for blended learning.



In his publishing career, Ubell was vice-president and editor-in-chief of Plenum Publishing Corporation, where he was head of its Russian scientific translation program. Later, he was editor of the National Magazine Award-winning New York Academy of Sciences monthly, The Sciences, and American publisher of the premier British science weekly, Nature. He was also founding publisher of Nature Biotechnology. Ubell is the author or editor of seven books and nearly 60 scholarly articles, as well as executive editor of the Cambridge Survey of Linguistics, Oxford Encyclopedia of Weather and Climate, and editor of multi-volume American Institute of Physics series, Masters of Modern Physics, among other notable works. His most recent book, Virtual Teamwork, was published by John Wiley in 2010. He is now at work on The Practice of Digital Education, scheduled to appear next year.



Ubell, who has participated in numerous corporate and nonprofit boards and advisory committees, including the National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council and National Academy of Engineering, currently serves on the Board of the Sloan Consortium and is president of the Board of the Parkinson's Unity Walk. He has been the principal investigator of nearly $2 million in grants from the National Science Foundation, Sloan Foundation, IEEE Foundation, and McGraw-Hill, among other sources.

Ubell received his undergraduate degree from Brooklyn College and has been a guest lecturer at MIT and Columbia's College of Physicians & Surgeons. Last year, he was named a Fellow of the Sloan Consortium and a Member of the Council of the Chongqing (China) International Exchange Association. He serves on the Advisory Council of the School of Natural and Behavioral Sciences at his alma mater, Brooklyn College.