COS professor appointed new dean of the faculty

The University announced yesterday that David Dobkin, who has chaired the computer science department for nine years, will be the new dean of the faculty beginning July 1.

Dobkin, who has been a Princeton professor for 22 years, said he is looking forward to working closely with President Tilghman and Provost Amy Gutmann.

"It's an incredible honor," he said. "A big attraction of the job is that they just seem like a wonderful team and the opportunity to join such a team is fabulous."

Dobkin said he did not yet have specific goals in shaping the curriculum or faculty recruitment.

He said his first priority is to meet as many faculty members as possible outside the computer science department. "The University is a lot bigger than computer science and I want to find out what that is," he added.

He will succeed Joseph Taylor, a physics professor who has been dean of the faculty since 1997. Taylor said last fall that he would return to full-time teaching and research at the end of the academic year.

Philip Nord, a history professor who chaired the search committee, said that in talking to department chairs and faculty members about possible candidates, "David Dobkin's name came up over and over again."

"He's obviously been a terrific chair of computer science," Nord said. Many faculty members praised Dobkin's energy, vision, good judgment, integrity and ability to relate to others, Nord added.

The search committee was impressed by Dobkin's ideas in addition to his record, Nord said. "He had some vision of where he wanted to take the University but he's also a compassionate person," he said.

President Tilghman said Dobkin has earned the respect and admiration of his colleagues during his term as department chair.

"Over the past nine years, he has led the Department of Computer Science with great intelligence and vision to become one of the most distinguished in the world," Tilghman said in a press release. "He is highly regarded by his colleagues as a scholar and an innovative teacher, as well as a man of excellent judgment and great integrity."

Last semester, Dobkin taught a freshman seminar with sociology professor Paul DiMaggio on "Sex, Money and Rock and Roll: Information Technology and Society." The course examined the human impact of the rise of the Internet and looked at policy dilemmas involving information technology.

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Dobkin came to Princeton as a professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and became a professor of computer science in 1985 when the department was formed.

He joined the faculty after teaching at Yale University and the University of Arizona. He earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Harvard University.