Colleges and Universities Announce the Appointments of Six Women to Dean Positions

Caroline Freund has been appointed the next dean of the University of California San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy, effective July 1, 2021. She currently serves as global director for trade, investment, and competitiveness at the World Bank. She is the author of Rich People Poor Countries: The Rise of Emerging Market Tycoons and Their Mega Firms (Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2016).

Dr. Freund is a graduate of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where she majored in economics and mathematics. She holds a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University in New York City.

Joanna Grabski has been named the next dean for the College of Integrative Arts and Sciences at Arizona State Univerity. She has been serving as director of the School of Art at the university. She is the author of Art World City: The Creative Economy of Artists and Urban Life in Dakar (Indiana University Press, 2017).

Dr. Grabski holds a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree, and a Ph.D. in art history, all from Indiana University.

Franklin College in Indiana has appointed Kristin Flora as vice president for academic affairs and dean of the college. She has held the position on an acting basis since June 2020 and is a member of the faculty in the psychology department.

Dr. Flora holds a bachelor’s degree from Valparaiso University in Indiana. She earned master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Katherine E. Gregory has been named dean of the Connell School of Nursing at Boston College. She has been serving as the associate chief nursing officer for women’s and newborn health, research, and innovation at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. She previously taught at Boston College from 2006 to 2014.

Dr. Gregory received a bachelor’s degree in nursing from Binghamton University in New York. She holds a master’s degree in nursing from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in nursing from Boston College.

Debra J. Barksdale will be the next dean of the School of Nursing at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, effective July 19. She will also serve as a professor of family and consumer nursing. Currently, Dr. Barksdale is a professor of nursing and the associate dean of academic affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University. Earlier, she was the first Black faculty member to achieve the rank of full professor in the School of Nursing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Dr. Barksdale is a graduate of the University of Virginia. She holds a master’s degree in nursing from Howard University in Washington, D.C., and a Ph.D. in nursing research from the University of Michigan.

Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, professor of demography and sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, has been named the next executive dean of the College of Letters & Science at the university, effective July 1.

After obtaining an undergraduate degree in anthropology at Berkeley, she studied at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, earning a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in anthropology.