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Dear colleagues,

I am pleased to announce that Noreen McDonald will be the next senior associate dean for social sciences and global programs in the College of Arts and Sciences, effective Jan. 1, 2023. She will succeed Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, who will complete his term on Dec. 31.

This year I introduced a new, more transparent process for selecting senior associate deans, which involved public interviews and formally solicited feedback from department chairs across the College. We had two very strong candidates for this position, and I would like to publicly thank them for their willingness to participate in this new model. We are fortunate to have two such excellent faculty willing to help lead the College.

Noreen has been a member of the UNC faculty since 2007. Since 2016 she has served as chair of the department of city and regional planning, where she holds the Thomas Willis Lambeth Distinguished Term Chair in Public Policy. She is also the associate director of both the Collaborative Sciences Center for Road Safety and the Southeastern Transportation Research, Innovation, Education and Development Center.

Noreen’s scholarship is at the intersection of city planning and public health. Her current projects focus on how transport technology, policy, and COVID-19 impact road safety, goods movement, and access to healthcare. She is an internationally recognized expert on the travel behavior of youth and young adults whose work has demonstrated the road safety and physical activity impacts of transport and school infrastructure.

Noreen received her undergraduate degree in engineering and chemistry from Harvard University and her Ph.D. in city planning from UC Berkeley.

As senior associate dean, Noreen will oversee the departments/curricula and other units in the social sciences: aerospace studies; African, African American and diaspora studies; anthropology; archaeology; Asian and Middle Eastern studies; city and regional planning; economics; geography; history; military science; naval science; peace, war and defense; political science; public policy; sociology; and the Center for Urban and Regional Studies.

She will also oversee the global programs of the College that are housed in the FedEx Global Education Center: the curriculum in global studies, the Office of Study Abroad, African Studies Center, Carolina Asia Center, Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies, Center for European Studies, Institute for the Study of the Americas, and the Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies.

Please join me in welcoming Noreen to the Dean’s Office at the beginning of the spring semester. Once again, I would like to extend my gratitude to Rudi for his outstanding leadership in this role.

Sincerely,

Jim

James W.C. White
Craver Family Dean
College of Arts and Sciences

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