The following message was sent to the Drexel community:
Dear Students and Colleagues,
Following a national search, we are pleased to announce that David S. Brown, PhD, will become the next dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, beginning September 1.
A scholar of political science with expertise in political institutions and their impact on economic development, Dr. Brown is currently the Divisional Dean for Social Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, an Association of American Universities (AAU) and R1 research institution. Since 2018, Dr. Brown has overseen 10 department or program units and 150 faculty. He led the College's strategic planning process as chair and served as a member of the College's Core Curriculum Revision Committee as well as CU Boulder's Task Force on Student Retention. He currently serves as co-chair of the College's Quality Teaching Initiative, a college-wide effort to define quality teaching and provide departments with the evaluative tools necessary to improve teaching assessment.
Dr. Brown has published widely on Latin American politics and democracy and conducted NSF-funded fieldwork on the impact of NGO funding in the Brazilian Amazon. He is also a longtime board member of CU Boulder's Latin American Studies Center and has received two Awards of Student Appreciation for Teaching with Technology.
A strong collaborator and interdisciplinary scholar who believes in active-learning approaches, Dr. Brown created an Innovation Incubator at CU College of Arts and Sciences, to support faculty development of new and inventive pedagogies. The program received strong faculty interest and led to the creation of four interdisciplinary innovation teams focused on: Inclusive Data Science, Metacognition and Wellness, Student Success, and Student Publishing. In addition to receiving national attention, funding raised through the initiative supported multiple conferences that welcomed faculty and practitioners from other universities and organizations, and individuals from the Boulder community.
Dr. Brown joined CU Boulder in 2002 as an assistant professor of political science, quickly taking on administrative roles as associate chair and director of graduate studies (2006-2008) and chair (2012-2018) of the Department of Political Science. He received his PhD in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles and completed the Institute for Management and Leadership in Education at Harvard University in 2019.
We would like to sincerely thank Interim Dean Kelly Joyce, PhD, for her strong, collaborative leadership of the College over the past year. We are also grateful to Dean Chuck Cairns, MD, for chairing the search, as well as the search committee and every colleague who put their time and effort into this process.
Please join us in welcoming Dr. Brown to Drexel.
Sincerely,
John Fry
