The Divisional Deans play a leading role in academic, capital, and campaign planning for the Arts and Sciences divisions. They report directly to the executive vice president, and work with each other and the EVP to ensure the overall coordination of their efforts with the senior staff (especially within academic affairs).
They exercise supervision of academic departments, research centers, institutes and other major units in their division. This includes faculty business that consists of searches, hires, leaves and retentions. They also play a role in budgeting with setting salaries in conjunction with the respective chair, determining research support funding, and monitoring their division’s expenditures. Additionally, they manage renovations and space requests, ARC reviews and oversee research misconduct, conflict of interest, conflict of commitment and equal opportunity.
Dean of Humanities
 | Sarah Cole specializes in British literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, with an emphasis on the modernist period. Areas of interest include war and violence, history and memory, sexuality and the body, and Irish literature of the modernist period. She is the author of two books, At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and co-directs the NYNJ Modernism Seminar, a regional scholarly colloquium. She has published articles in journals such as ELH, Modern Fiction Studies, Modernism/Modernity, and PMLA, and has written essays for a variety of edited collections. Professor Cole received a B.A. in English from Williams College and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the recipient of a 2014 Guggeinheim Fellowship for a book project entitled "The Wells Era." |
Dean of Science
 | Robert D. Mawhinney is Dean of Science and a Professor of Physics at Columbia University. He received his B.S. in Physics from the University of South Florida in 1980 and his Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard University in 1987. His research is in the area of theoretical particle physics, with a particular focus on the behavior of quarks and the theory which describes their interactions, Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). |
Dean of Social Science
 | Miguel Urquiola is Dean of Social Science and Professor of Economics at Columbia University. He has chaired Columbia’s Department of Economics and its Committee on the Economics of Education. He is also a member of the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). Outside Columbia, Urquiola is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and has held appointments at Cornell University, the World Bank, the Bolivian Catholic University, and the Bolivian government. Urquiola’s research is on the Economics of Education. Its focus is on understanding how schools and universities compete, and how educational markets differ from other markets economists study. He has written numerous journal articles on these issues, and a book on why American universities excel at research: Markets, Minds, and Money. |