I am honored and excited to have been appointed the Interim Dean of a school I care so much about. I joined the School of Communication and Information six years ago as the Associate Dean for Programs, but my acquaintance with the school goes way back. In a former position as a faculty member and later Chair of the Department of Communication at Tel Aviv University, Israel (where I am originally from), I had the opportunity to facilitate the hiring of two graduates of SC&I’s Ph.D. program. Both became, over the years, leaders in higher education. This tells you how high the reputation of Rutgers in Israel is! At departmental meetings at Tel Aviv, on our seventh-floor seminar room overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, in the heat of an academic discussion, one of them would say, “but at Rutgers, we used to do it this way [or that way],” forcing us to think out of the box, innovatively, on cutting-edge issues. As it turned out, upon joining SC&I years later, I discovered that these qualities have indeed endured.
The transition to the Interim Dean role has been smooth and natural (if you don’t consider moving boxes of books and using the opportunity to painfully let go of many). Working collaboratively with our outgoing dean, Jonathan Potter, and with our two associate deans, Karen Novick and Mark Aakhus, has prepared me to feel comfortable about what I don’t know yet, and need to learn. The solid support of my colleagues—faculty, staff, and Ph.D. students, who already know me quite well—continues to be the wind beneath my wings that gets me enthusiastically into the office (and into my devices and zooms) each day. There is so much quality of doing and being in the school’s community: in the faculty’s outstanding research and teaching, in our students’ eagerness to learn and grow, in our staff’s continuous efforts at providing a backbone for all we do, and in our alumni base’s loyalty and love for their alma mater. It fills me with the energy needed not only for a smooth transition of leadership but to move the school forward at a time of significant uncertainties: changes to the nature of higher education, reinvigoration of Rutgers’ strategic and diversity plans, and the fluid and dynamic characteristics of our disciplines. We are also facing challenges to our well-being—many in our community are navigating burnout and changes in their working environment and the surrounding climate (both literally and culturally).
I intend to spend the next two years investing in the future of our excellent school and fostering resilience in our community. I wish to serve as a bridge between continents, disciplines, methods, and individuals. I hope to facilitate collaborations within the school, across other schools at Rutgers, and in the communities and industries with which we engage. My goal is to help members of the SC&I community maximize their potential and thrive. A collegial environment is a key to accomplishing it, and I am counting on each member of our school’s community to make it possible. It is up to us, together.
Here is a toast to a new academic year, full of promises and beginnings! May it be happy, healthy, fulfilling, productive, and inclusive for every member of our SC&I community!
Interim Dean
Distinguished Professor of Journalism and Media Studies
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As our work and interactions have evolved over the past two years, many members of the SC&I community have developed new expectations about what options should be possible in a post-Covid university for staff, faculty, and students. There are new possibilities for incorporating flexible scheduling and multiple modalities into our professional lives to optimize the benefits of both remote and campus-based work into a hybrid weekly schedule that is effective for the university and supports our individual work/life balance. Beginning Fall 2022, staff at SC&I–like most academic staff in Rutgers-New Brunswick- will be working on campus three days and remotely two days each week.
Rutgers and SC&I are exploring our assumptions about which workplace norms make the most sense. During this year, we will consider some creative strategies to assure that our policies and practices allow us to remain a thriving environment in which to work and learn while advancing the mission of Rutgers University.
Associate Dean for Administration
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Greetings! I am excited to embark this year as the inaugural Assistant Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at SC&I. As we implement the school’s Diversity Strategic Plan, the SC&I community will come together to learn best practices and implement strategies that foster belonging, build inclusiveness, and provide support for diverse faculty groups, staff, and students.
Even as we engage in the activities of learning and building, I hope you will join me in the work of unlearning. The unlearning process entails questioning our traditional assumptions of what is and what "should" be, interrogating the why behind our policies and practices, and even deconstructing our language and decision-making processes to understand how we privilege and marginalize certain groups in systematic ways. Rethinking our traditional ways of being will not always be easy, but the change that emerges will be worth it.
I look forward to working with everyone to strengthen our beloved community at SC&I and open up new possibilities for creating inclusive and flexible structures that work better for us all.
Assistant Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
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The School of Communication and Information has a leading role in three critical initiatives for transforming research, education, and societal engagement at Rutgers-New Brunswick (RU-NB). First, a new Data Science major, developed by a working group from SC&I and the departments of Computer Science and Statistics, will appeal to students across a broad spectrum of interests who seek proficiency in the principles of computation, statistical inference, and data management as applied in particular domains and fields. Second, a strategic diversity cluster hiring in collaboration with Computer Science, Statistics, and the School of Engineering seeks to attract senior scholars who will accelerate leadership on campus and generate synergy across units for research and teaching that advances Fair and Responsible Data Science. Third, a Provost's Task Force on Cyberinfrastructure and Data Science, on which SC&I will play an important leadership role, will envision how to consolidate existing strengths at RU-NB around a new framework for research cyberinfrastructure and the areas of data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence that will foster a new decade of growth for Rutgers.
Our research community's focus on the elementary matters of society—communication, information, and media—enables robust empirical, critical, and design attention to data in context, and thus scaffolds innovative rethinking of the science of data. It is this orientation to data in context that positions SC&I as a key collaborator with other areas of expertise in building these new platforms at Rutgers for engaging the digitalization that is impacting nearly all walks of life.
Associate Dean for Research and
Professor of Communication
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4 Huntington Street
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
Phone Number:
848.932.7500
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