Provosts

Prior to being named Provost, Coleman served as dean of the College of Liberal Arts and a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota since 2014. He was previously chair of the Political Science Department, a Lyons Family Faculty Fellow, and the Glenn B. and Cleone Orr Hawkins Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was on the faculty for over 20 years and received the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award. He has also held a faculty position at the University of Texas at Austin and was a research associate and instructor at Harvard Business School.

A nationally recognized scholar, he is the author or editor of seven books on American politics and government and numerous articles in major journals and edited volumes. His research interests include political parties, elections and voting, legislative-executive relations, divided government, campaign finance, American political development, and the intersection of politics and economics. He served as president of the American Political Science Association’s section on political organizations and parties.

Rahul Shrivastav was appointed Executive Vice President and Provost of Indiana University on February 15, 2022.  He received his doctoral degree in speech and hearing sciences, with a minor in cognitive sciences, from Indiana University. His undergraduate and graduate training are in speech and hearing sciences from the University of Mysore, India.

In addition to his executive leadership role, Dr. Shrivastav will also have a faculty appointment in the Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences. Prior to his appointment at Indiana University, he served as vice president for instruction at the University of Georgia. Before joining the University of Georgia, Dr. Shrivastav served as professor and chair of the Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders and directed the Voice and Speech Laboratory at Michigan State University. 

Dr. Shrivastav also served on the faculty at the University of Florida and directed its Voice Acoustics and Perception Laboratory and was a research scientist at the Malcom Randal VA Medical Center, where he was a part of the Oral-Motor Research Group within the Brain Rehabilitation Research Center. In 2007, he co-founded the start-up company Audigence, Inc. to commercialize some of the intellectual property developed by this research group. He has served as chief scientist and on the scientific advisory board for Audigence.

He has received numerous awards and honors during his career, including the Colonel Allan R. and Margaret G. Crow Term Professorship at the University of Florida. In 2013, he was named a Fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. The National Academy of Inventors elected him as a Fellow in 2020.

His research is focused on speech perception abilities and speech production deficits in people with various diseases. This work helps design better health care and commercial applications, measurement systems for treatment outcomes, improved hearing aids, cochlear implants and mobile phones, and assessment and screening tools for a variety of diseases. He also serves several national and international professional organizations in various scientific, administrative, and executive roles.

Jennifer King Rice was named Senior Vice President and Provost of the University of Maryland effective August 11, 2021. Dr. Rice earned her Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Education Administration and Social Foundations from Cornell University. She received her bachelors in Mathematics and English from Marquette University, where she was recently honored with the Professional Achievement Award from the Marquette University Klingler College of Arts and Sciences.

 For over 25 years, Dr. Rice has served on the faculty and in college leadership roles at the University of Maryland. Prior to joining the faculty at Maryland, she was a researcher at Mathematica Policy Research.  Most recently, Dr. Rice served as the dean of the University of Maryland’s College of Education and professor of education policy. In this role, Rice has focused her efforts to align educational resources with key initiatives to advance excellence, equity, and social justice in preschool through graduate school. Upon becoming dean, she led the College of Education community through an inclusive strategic planning process, which has resulted in new and innovative initiatives to promote the College’s shared values, vision, and goals. Her emphasis on college-level research infrastructure, enhancements in instructional programming and diversity, equity and inclusion have propelled the college forward in reputation and rankings during her tenure.

As a national expert in education finance and policy, Rice regularly consults with policy organizations and agencies at the state and federal levels. She has been a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and a visiting fellow at the Urban Institute. She is currently a fellow of the National Education Policy Center and served as president of the Association of Education Finance and Policy. She sits on two charter school boards, is a University System of Maryland representative on the Maryland State Teacher Certification Advisory Council, and recently co-chaired the Association of American Universities Annual Deans’ meeting. Dr. Rice also served as co-chair of the Maryland Education Deans and Directors Council.

As a University of Maryland Distinguished Scholar-Teacher awardee, Dr. Rice has published numerous articles and book chapters. Her authored and edited books include Performance-Based Pay for Educators: Assessing the Evidence, Fiscal Policy in Urban Education, and Teacher Quality: Understanding the Effectiveness of Teacher Attributes, winner of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education book award. She also served on the editorial boards of American Educational Research Journal and Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, and recently completed a term on the editorial board for Education Finance and Policy.

Christopher P. Long is the provost and senior vice president at the University of Oregon. Recognized for values-enacted leadership, Provost Long is committed to the transformative power of liberal arts research and teaching by enriching graduate and undergraduate education, recruiting and retaining world-class faculty, and creating new opportunities for leading-edge research.

Provost Long joined the university in June 2024. He has more than 20 years of academic leadership experience from the public research universities of Michigan State University and Penn State. He identifies integrity, trust, equity, collaboration, and excellence as the core values that inform his leadership as the chief academic officer at the University of Oregon. As provost, he is responsible for the programs, policies, and priorities that shape the university's academic life. Working collaboratively with leadership across the university, the Office of the Provost leads efforts to ensure that students, staff, and faculty can flourish in an environment that cultivates excellence through diversity, belonging, responsible inquiry, trust, and dialogue.  

The provost reports to the president of the university and, in his absence, acts on behalf of the president. As chief academic officer, the provost serves as the spokesperson for academic matters at the university. 

Provost Long has more than $7 million of funded research projects, including the Mellon funded Less Commonly Taught and Indigenous Languages Partnership with the Big 10 Academic Alliance, a participatory research initiative and teaching framework developed in reciprocal partnership with Indigenous communities and institutions across the Big 10; the Public Philosophy Journal, an innovative online publication for accessible scholarship that deepens our understanding of publicly relevant issues; and HuMetricsHSS, a values-enacted initiative committed to transforming higher education by aligning indicators of academic excellence with core personal and institutional values.  

An expert in both ancient Greek and contemporary continental philosophy, Provost Long’s extensive publication record include four books: The Ethics of Ontology (SUNY 2004), Aristotle On the Nature of Truth (Cambridge 2010), Socratic and Platonic Political Philosophy: Practicing a Politics of Reading (Cambridge 2014), and Reiner Schürmann and the Poetics of Politics (Punctum 2018).  

Prior to joining the UO he was dean of both the College of Arts & Letters and Honors College at Michigan State University where he was a Research Foundation Professor of Philosophy. Before that, he was the associate dean for graduate and undergraduate education and a professor of philosophy and classics in the College of the Liberal Arts at Pennsylvania State University. Provost Long received his MA and Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research in New York and BA from Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio.  

To learn more about Provost Long’s administrative approach, his research, and his academic life, visit his website: cplong.org or engage with him on Mastodon at https://hcommons.social/@cplong. 

Tracy Langkilde, the Verne M. Willaman Dean of the Eberly College of Science, was named interim executive vice president and provost of Penn State, effective April 15.

 Tracy Langkilde is internationally recognized for her research in herpetology, the biology of amphibians and reptiles. Her recent work has been at the interface of ecology and evolution, focused on understanding how organisms’ behavior and physiology are matched to their environment, and how they respond to novel selective pressures imposed by global environmental change. She came to Penn State in 2007 and has served as the department head of biology since 2016. Langkilde was appointed dean of the Eberly College of Science on August 24, 2020.

 She began her academic career in 2007 as an assistant professor of biology at Penn State and advanced to associate professor in 2012 and then professor in 2016. She has been a leader in graduate and undergraduate education and programs in biology, and over her tenure at the University has trained 8 postdoctoral scholars, 13 doctoral students, and 2 master’s students, as well as more than 60 undergraduates in her research program. Langkilde has also championed a number of initiatives advancing inclusion, equity, and diversity at Penn State, promoting excellence in research and education, and engaging students, faculty, and alumni across the University, and she continued to mentor graduate and undergraduate students in her research  lab, located in Mueller Laboratory.

 Langkilde earned her bachelor’s degree in 1999 from the School of Tropical Biology at James Cook University and her doctorate in 2005 from the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Sydney, after which she pursued postdoctoral studies as a Gaylord Donnelley Environmental Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies for two years prior to her first academic appointment at Penn State. For her research, Langkilde was named Distinguished Herpetologist—the field’s top honor—in 2019 by the Herpetologists’ League, an international organization of people devoted to studying herpetology. And in 2011, she received the Edward D. Bellis Award in Ecology for her outstanding contribution and dedication to educating and training graduate students in Penn State’s Intercollegiate Graduate Degree Program in Ecology. Langkilde was also a featured researcher in one of the most widely used biology undergraduate textbooks, Campbell Biology.

Back to top

Michael S. Levine, Ph.D., currently serves as interim executive vice chancellor and provost, responsible for administering UCLA’s operations and the academic enterprise. He will serve in the position until December 31, 2024.

In his regular role, Levine serves as UCLA’s vice chancellor for academic affairs and personnel, overseeing the approval of all major faculty promotions and advancements as well as creating programs for faculty development. A seasoned administrator and member of the faculty since 1976, he has been in the position since 2016. Levine has twice previously served as interim EVCP, from July to September 2019 and from October 2021 to September 2022.

Levine is also a distinguished professor in the David Geffen School of Medicine and previously held the Gail Patrick Endowed Chair in Brain Research. His research focuses on the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying neurodegenerative disorders. His multidisciplinary work carries implications for such disorders as Huntington’s and Parkinson’s diseases and pediatric epilepsy. He has published approximately 250 peer-reviewed research reports as well as more than 30 book chapters, and he has received research support from a variety of agencies within the National Institutes of Health, as well as from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the Office of Naval Research and numerous foundations.

Among many other honors and awards, Levine is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and he received the National Association for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression’s Distinguished Investigator Award. He also received the UCLA Neuroscience Undergraduate Society’s Excellence in Teaching Award, the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences Undergraduate Teaching Award and the UCLA Council of Advisors’ Outstanding Advisor Award.

Dr. Andrew T. Guzman is USC’s provost and senior vice president for academic affairs. He oversees the overall academic enterprise of the university, including 18 of the university’s schools and academic units, USC Museums, and the divisions of student life, libraries, student religious and spiritual life, and enrollment services. He proudly holds the distinction of being USC’s first Latinx provost. 

 Provost Guzman joined USC in 2015 where he served as the dean at the USC Gould School of Law (2015-2023) and the interim dean of USC Libraries (2022-2023). He holds the Shelly and Ofer Nemirovsky Provost’s Chair and is a Professor of Law and Political Science.

 A noted expert in international law and economics, Guzman has written extensively on international trade, international regulatory matters, foreign direct investment, and public international law. His work has addressed international tribunals, soft law, the safety of imported products and climate change. In addition, his interdisciplinary research examines problems across the range of public and private international law. He is the author of Overheated: The Human Cost of Climate Change, How International Law Works and International Trade Law, and the upcoming Goldilocks Governance: Understanding International Soft Law.

 Prior to joining USC, Guzman was a professor of law and associate dean at UC Berkeley, where he directed the International and Executive Legal Education Program. He has also taught at as a visiting professor at numerous law schools in the U.S. and across the globe, including Harvard, the University of Chicago, the University of Virginia, Vanderbilt, the University of Hamburg, and the National University Law School in Bangalore, India.

 Guzman earned his JD and PhD in Economics from Harvard University, where he was the Books & Commentaries Editor for the Harvard Law Review.

Tricia R. Serio joined the University of Washington as provost and executive vice president for academic affairs in 2023. A biochemist, Dr. Serio also holds a faculty appointment in the UW School of Medicine’s Department of Biochemistry.

As the UW’s academic and budget officer, Dr. Serio is focusing her leadership on core areas to advance the University’s academic mission.

Dr. Serio (she/her pronouns) came to the UW from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she was provost and senior vice chancellor for academic affairs. A professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, Dr. Serio previously served at UMass Amherst as associate chancellor for strategic academic planning and dean of the College of Natural Sciences. She has also held research and professorial positions at the University of Arizona, Brown University and Yale University.

At UMass Amherst, Dr. Serio launched and led initiatives to increase diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging for faculty, staff and students, which included equity action plans for classroom belonging and faculty workload and a staff advisory council. She also established initiatives to promote faculty scholarship and creative activity that focused on sustainability, healthy aging, society and technology, inclusive excellence, data science and mid-career research support.

A first-generation college graduate, Dr. Serio earned her bachelor’s degree in molecular biology at Lehigh University and completed her master’s degree and Ph.D. in molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale.

Dr. Serio’s research centers on prion proteins, which are associated with infectious neurodegenerative disease in mammals (e.g., mad cow disease and Creuzfeldt-Jakob Disease). These diseases arise when prion proteins change their shape, and a similar process underlies non-infectious neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. An unusual event for proteins, Dr. Serio’s work seeks to understand how these changes in shape are triggered with the goal of blocking or reversing them. Her research uses baker’s yeast as a non-infectious model for experiments at the molecular, cellular, and biochemical levels, and she has a long-standing collaboration with Suzanne Sindi, an applied mathematician at UC Merced, to develop quantitative and predictive models for these transitions.

Dr. Serio has earned numerous recognitions for her research, including being named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Predoctoral Fellow, a Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Cancer Research Postdoctoral Fellow, and a Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences. She also received the Howard Temin Award from the National Cancer Institute and the Mid-Career Award for Research Excellence from the American Society of Cell Biology, and she is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Charles Lee Isbell, Jr. began serving as the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs in August of 2023. He received his bachelor of science degree from Georgia Tech and a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Prior to his appointment at UW-Madison, Dr. Isbell served as the Dean and John P. Imlay, Jr. Chair of the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology, beginning July 2019. He also conducted research at AT&T Labs/Research before joining the faculty of the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. While at Georgia Tech, he served as an Associate Dean, Senior Associate Dean, and Executive Associate Dean of the College of Computing.

Dr. Isbell is a computationalist, researcher, educator, and advocate for access in higher education. His research interests are varied and include artificial intelligence with particular emphasis on developing technologies that can interact with systems and with humans in ways that are adaptive and collaborative, including using machine learning to model human behavior. His focus throughout his academic career has been both on research and educational reform. He is a strong believer in the role of higher education generally, and broad, research-focused universities in particular, in providing opportunities for deep engagement in what it means to be an active and productive citizen.

Dr. Isbell’s work has been featured in technical collections, but also the popular media, including The New York Times, the Washington Post, and Netflix. He has won best paper awards for his technical contributions; been named a National Academy of Sciences Kavli Fellow; and been awarded both the NSF CAREER and DARPA CSSG awards for young investigators. He is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAA&S). He has served on a number of advisory boards for the National Science Foundation (NSF), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the National Academies.

A leading scholar in the economic analysis of health care policy, she is the Emmett Dedmon Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, where she served as Dean for five years prior to being appointed Provost.