Two Women Deans Announce They are Stepping Down From Their Posts

Mary Kerr, dean of the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, announced that she will leave her post at the end of the current academic year. She has been dean of the nursing school since 2011. After a one-year sabbatical, Dr. Kerr will return to the faculty at the nursing school in the fall of 2019.

Dr. Kerr is an expert on traumatic brain injury and has more than 100 published articles to her credit. Before becoming dean, Dr. Kerr was the deputy director of the National Institute for Nursing Research at the National Institutes of Health. Earlier in her career she was director of the Center for Nursing Research at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Kerr earned a doctorate in nursing at Case Western Reserve University.

Lizabeth A. Cohen, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, announced that she will leave her post in June 2018. She will have led the institute for seven years. Dr. Cohen will take a one-year sabbatical and return to her post as a professor of history at Harvard. Professor Cohen is the author of Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Dr. Cohen is a 1973 graduate of Princeton University. This was the first graduating class at Princeton that included women. She holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley.