We are delighted to share two important announcements regarding our academic leadership team. Dr. Monica Jackson has been named interim deputy provost and dean of faculty, and Dr. Max Paul Friedman has been appointed to serve as the interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Jackson brings extensive experience to her new position. She has served as associate dean of undergraduate studies in the College of Arts and Sciences, as CAS’s first diversity, equity, and inclusion officer, and as a member of numerous search and tenure committees. She is also a principal investigator for AU's ADVANCE grant, analyzing gender and racial data and working to increase equity in these areas among STEM faculty.

As interim deputy provost and dean of faculty, she will oversee all faculty appointments, tenure and promotion processes, faculty misconduct cases, new faculty onboarding and retirements, as well as the Career Center, CTRL, AU Abroad, and the International Accelerator programs.

A professor of mathematics and statistics in CAS, Dr. Jackson has taught at American since 2005. She established the AU’s first Summer Program in Research and Learning, where undergraduate students and faculty from across the country conduct scientific research at AU.

Her primary areas of research interest are in spatial statistics and disease surveillance, and she has won numerous awards for her scholarship and service. Those include the Frederick Douglass Distinguished Scholars Faculty Fellow, The Delta Kappa Gamma International Educational Society Most Valuable Member, and the Morton Bender Prize for outstanding research. Prior to coming to AU, Dr. Jackson was a postdoctoral researcher at Emory University and an instructor at the University of Maryland. She has a BS and MS from Clark Atlanta University, and a PhD in applied mathematics and scientific computation from the University of Maryland.

Max Paul Friedman is a professor of history and international relations in the College of Arts and Sciences, where he has taught since 2007. Professor Friedman, who has a joint appointment in the Department of History in CAS and the School of International Service, specializes in 20th-century foreign relations. He teaches courses on US foreign policy and US relations with Latin America, and a class on social movements and their impact on changing American society, offered as part of the AU Core.

Dr. Friedman will assume his post as interim dean on July 1, 2020, as current CAS dean Peter Starr becomes Acting Provost for the university. For the past three years, Dr. Friedman has served as the chair of the Committee on Faculty Actions, an elected body of university faculty that handles matters related to appointments, reappointments, tenure, and promotion. 

Prior to joining American University, Dr. Friedman was an associate professor of history at Florida State University and a visiting professor at the University of Cologne. He also served as a Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Colorado Boulder. Among his many awards and honors is the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award, American University Scholar-Teacher of the Year, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Dr. Friedman holds a BA from Oberlin College, and an MA and a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. 

Please join us in congratulating Monica and Max and welcoming them to their important positions.