Sheena Murphy

As Associate Vice President for Research Development, Sheena Murphy provides strategic leadership to expand and diversify the university’s research and scholarly enterprise. She oversees initiatives that strengthen cross-disciplinary collaboration, grow federal funding, and align WVU’s research strengths with state and national priorities. Dr. Murphy develops and implements large-scale, multi-institutional proposals; advances strategic focus areas, and builds faculty capacity through proposal development support, mentoring, and targeted programs. She also drives data-informed planning and external engagement, partnering with state agencies, federal sponsors, and industry to enhance WVU’s role as a research leader and innovation driver.

Dr. Murphy is a physics professor and the recipient of over $20M in external funding. She served on NSF’s taskforce for the Future of EPSCoR and is an APLU Council of Research Leadership Fellow. She is a former Executive Committee member of the Oklahoma/Arkansas MRSEC, an NSF Career recipient, and a Sloan Foundation Fellow. She is an expert in low temperature, high magnetic field studies of two-dimensional electronic systems.

Degrees

• Cornell University, 1991
  PhD Physics
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1984
  SB Physics