An integrative initiative in creative work & learning.

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Paul Courant, Dean of Libraries

Paul N. Courant is University Librarian and Dean of Libraries, Harold T. Shapiro Collegiate Professor of Public Policy, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, Professor of Economics and Professor of Information at the University of Michigan. From 2002-2005 he served as Provost and Executive Vice-President for Academic Affairs, the chief academic officer and the chief budget officer of the University. He has also served as the Associate Provost for Academic and Budgetary Affairs, Chair of the Department of Economics and Director of the Institute of Public Policy Studies (which is now the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy). In 1979 and 1980 he was a Senior Staff Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers.

Courant has authored half a dozen books, and over seventy papers covering a broad range of topics in economics and public policy, including tax policy, state and local economic development, gender differences in pay, housing, radon and public health, relationships between economic growth and environmental policy, and university budgeting systems. More recently, his academic work has considered the economics of universities, the economics of libraries and archives, and the effects of new information technologies and other disruptions on scholarship, scholarly publication, and academic libraries.

Paul Courant holds a BA in History from Swarthmore College (1968); an MA in Economics from Princeton University (1973); and a PhD in Economics from Princeton University (1974).

Christopher Kendall, Dean, School of Music, Theatre & Dance

From 1996 to 2005 Christopher Kendall was Director of the University of Maryland School of Music, Theatre & Dance. Prior to 1996, he was associate conductor of the Seattle Symphony (1987–1993) then director of the Music Division and Tanglewood Institute of the Boston University School of the Arts. Since 1975 he has been the conductor and artistic director of the 20th CenturyConsort, ensemble-in-residence at the Smithsonian Institution, and since 1978 founder and lutenist of the Folger Consort, early music ensemble-in-residence at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Kendall has been guest conductor with the Seattle Symphony, the Dayton Philharmonic, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony (Ontario), the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, the New York Chamber Symphony; the Annapolis Symphony; the Da Capo Chamber Players, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Collage and Dinosaur Annex (both new music ensembles in Boston), the Orchestra, Symphony and Chamber Orchestra of The Juilliard School and the Musica Nova Ensemble at the Eastman School.

Kendall is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Emmy and the Washington Area Music (Wammie) Awards, 1984, 1987 and 1989, with the 20th Century Consort; the Woolson Award, 1989, with the Folger Consort; and the Smithson Award, 1992, with the 20th Century Consort. His performances can be heard in recording on the ASV, Centaur, Bard, Delos, CRI, Nonesuch, and Smithsonian Collection labels.

Terrence McDonald, Dean, College of Literature, Science, & the Arts

Terry McDonald has been Dean of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, the University of Michigan’s liberal arts college, since 2003. With more than 16,000 undergraduate and 2,000 graduate students, the College is the University’s largest, containing divisions for the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities.

Dean McDonald is the author or editor of four books and numerous articles and an award-winning American historian. He has received almost every teaching award the University confers. He joined the University in 1980, after receiving his doctorate from Stanford University.

Dean McDonald has been recognized for his work in American urban political history with prizes from the Social Science History Association and the California Historical Society. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and has received other fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Michigan Humanities Institute. He has served on the editorial boards of the journals Social Science History, Historical Methods, and Studies in American Political Development.

At the University, Dean McDonald has received the Ruth M. Sinclair Award for Student Counseling (1983), the Faculty Recognition Award for Outstanding Contributions to Teaching, Scholarship, and Service (1988), the Amoco Foundation Good Teaching Award (1991), and a State of Michigan Teaching Excellence Award (1991). He was appointed an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor for his contributions to undergraduate education in 1993.

David C. Munson, Jr., Dean, College of Engineering

David C. Munson, Jr., assumed the position of Robert J. Vlasic Dean of Engineering at the University of Michigan on July 1, 2006. Prior to becoming Dean, Munson was Chair of U-M’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Munson received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering (with distinction) from the University of Delaware in 1975, and the M.S., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1977, 1977, and 1979, respectively. From 1979 to 2003 he was with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Research Professor in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, and a faculty member in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.

Professor Munson’s teaching and research interests are in the general area of signal and image processing. His current research is focused on radar imaging, passive millimeter-wave imaging, and computer tomography. He has held summer positions in digital communications and speech processing, and he has served as a consultant in synthetic aperture radar to the Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory. He is co-founder of InstaRecon, Inc., a start-up to commercialize fast algorithms for image formation in computer tomography. He is affiliated with the Infinity Project, where he is coauthor of a textbook on the digital world, which is used in about 200 high schools nationwide to introduce students to engineering.

Professor Munson is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a past president of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, founding editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, and co-founder of the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing. In addition to multiple teaching awards and other honors, he was presented the Society Award of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, he served as a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, he received an IEEE Third Millennium Medal, and he was the Texas Instruments Distinguished Visiting Professor at Rice University. Prior to joining the University of Michigan, he was the Robert C. MacClinchie Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois.

Martha Pollack, Dean, School of Information

Martha E. Pollack is Dean of the School of Information, and Professor of Information and of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, having previously chaired the Computer Science and Engineering Division. She completed her undergraduate studies at Dartmouth College, earning her bachelor’s degree in linguistics summa cum laude in 1979, and then earned her M.S.E. (1984) and Ph.D. (1986) degrees in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining the faculty at Michigan in 2000, she was Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Intelligent Systems Program at the University of Pittsburgh, and before that was a research computer scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Center, SRI International, Menlo Park, CA.

Pollack’s area of expertise is Artificial Intelligence; she has done research and published widely on topics including adaptive interfaces, temporal reasoning, constraint satisfaction processing, automated plan generation, and natural-language processing. She is a pioneer in the application of AI approaches to the design of technology for people with cognitive impairment, a topic about which she testified before the United State Senate Subcommittee on Aging. With support from the National Science Foundation’s Information Technology Research for National Priorities (ITR) program, she was a founding member of the “Nursebot” team, and principal architect of the “Autominder” system, which introduced the idea of using AI methods to design technology aimed at helping people with cognitive impairment lead more autonomous lives.

Pollack is currently the President of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI); a member of the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association (CRA); and a member of the Advisory Committee of the National Science Foundation’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate. An elected Fellow of the AAAI, her other professional awards include the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award (1991), an NSF Young Investigator’s Award (1992), the University of Pittsburgh Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award (2000), and the AAMAS Influential Paper (“Test of Time”) Award (2008). She is also active in programs to increase the representation of women and minorities in STEM fields and was a recipient of the 2007 Sarah Goddard Power Award in recognition of those activities.

Monica Ponce de Leon, Dean, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning

Professor Ponce de Leon received a Bachelor of Architecture degree in 1989 from the University of Miami and the Master of Architecture in Urban Design degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1991.

She joined the Harvard Graduate School of Design faculty in 1996, following appointments on the faculties of University of Miami, Northeastern University, and Georgia Institute of Technology. She has held visiting professorships at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and the Rhode Island School of Design. She has received honors from the Architectural League of New York (Emerging Voices, 2003, and Young Architects Award, 1997) and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (Award in Architecture, 2002). Her practice has received over 30 design awards, among which are the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award (2007), the AIA/LA Design Award (Helios House, 2007), the I.D. Magazine Award: Environment (2007) and the AIA/ALA Library Building Award (2007) for the Fleet Library at the Rhode Island School of Design, and ten Progressive Architecture Awards. Most recently Office dA was awarded the American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment?s (COTE) Top Ten Green Projects for 2008 for the Macallen Building in Boston.

Among her authored works are numerous articles in U.S. and international publications on topics ranging from Latin American architecture to eco-tourism to public infrastructure for the tropics.

The portfolio of Monica Ponce de Leon's firm, Office dA, includes institutional, residential, commercial, housing, governmental, industrial design and urban design projects all over the world. Among the more recent are the Fleet Library at Rhode Island School of Design, the Tongxian Arts Center in Beijing, Helios House/Rebranding of a Gas Station in Los Angeles, an Intergenerational Housing Center for the City of Chicago, a dynamic low-cost housing for the Elemental program in Chile, the first LEED certified large residential project in Boston and a border station between the U.S. and Canada.

Bryan Rogers, Dean, School of Art & Design

Bryan Rogers served as head of the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University from 1988 through 1999. Prior to that, he was professor of art at San Francisco State University, where he founded the Conceptual Design Program. Rogers has also held appointments at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at M.I.T. and the University of California at Berkeley. From 1982 to 1985, he was editor of the international art-science-technology journal Leonardo. He completed a year of post-graduate work at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich on a fellowship from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst. He has also held fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

At Carnegie Mellon, Rogers led the development of a number of innovative programs in art and design, stressing the importance of connections to other fields of inquiry. As founding director of the Studio for Creative Inquiry, an interdisciplinary outreach center dedicated to fostering ambitious, experimental, advanced-technology projects in the arts, he significantly strengthened Carnegie Mellon's interactions with regional and international communities. He also served as principal investigator on major NSF and NASA supported projects.

At Michigan, Rogers has led the complete restructuring of the educational programs within the School of Art and Design. A major thrust of this effort has been to firmly engage the School with the University and the broader community, both local and global. Focused on creative work and infused with contemporary information and imaging technologies, the new programs endeavor to unite the domains of art-making and designing.

In addition to his administrative accomplishments, Rogers is a sculptor and installation artist whose work has been widely exhibited in the U.S. and internationally. His work explores conceptual intersections of art, science and technology, often manifesting in complex, interactive installations of kinetic objects.

Theresa Reid, Executive Director

Theresa Reid is the author of Two Little Girls: A Memoir of Adoption, published in April 2006 and 2007 by the Penguin Group. She is also a contributing editor to The APSAC Handbook on Child Maltreatment (Sage Publications, 1996; Second Edition 2002), a comprehensive general textbook. Her writing has also been published in The New York Review of Books, Adoptive Families, Literary Mama, and elsewhere.

Reid served as Executive Director of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children (APSAC) for ten years, where she was instrumental in building the organization’s membership from 200 to more than 5000; developing its Board of Directors, committee and state chapter networks, and professional training series; and establishing and editing several highly regarded publications. She spoke regularly at regional and national conferences on child maltreatment, and served on several federal panels and other national bodies pertaining to child maltreatment practice, research, and legislation. Through a grant from the Soros Foundation’s Open Society Initiative, Reid has taught seminars in organizational development and media coverage of child sexual abuse to social service professionals in Eastern Europe.

She served for three years as the first President of the Board of the Chicago Children’s Advocacy Center, directing Board development, the production of policies and procedures governing Board operations and staff oversight, and the creation of CCAC's first strategic plan.

With a full academic scholarship, Reid earned her PhD in English from the University of Chicago, completing a dissertation entitled “An Ethical Analysis of Discourse on Child Sexual Abuse from 1860 to the Present” under the direction of Wayne Booth, then Gerald Graff.