Dean chosen for Pitt’s new computing college
Six months after creating the first new college or school at the University of Pittsburgh in more than two decades, officials Monday announced its founding dean.
Paul Cohen will head the School of Computing and Information, effective Aug. 1. He currently is a program manager within the Information Innovation Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The new school was created by combining Pitt’s School of Information Sciences and the computer science department within the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. Pitt has earmarked about $30 million in startup money to support the endeavor.
In his current job since 2013, Mr. Cohen, 61, directs programs in an array of areas, including communication between humans and machines, cancer biology, extracting knowledge from text, and global and national security, the university said in making the announcement.
Among those are the Big Mechanism and the Communicating with Computers programs, Pitt officials said.
Prior to that, Mr. Cohen was a professor and founding director of what is now the School of Information at the University of Arizona. He was on the faculty there since 2008.
He also worked at the University of Southern California from 2003 to 2008 and at the University of Massachusetts from 1983 to 2003.
“Paul is a visionary leader who will quickly drive our School of Computing and Information to the forefront of academic excellence,” Pitt chancellor Patrick Gallagher said in a statement accompanying the announcement. “He is also an expert collaborator and a leading authority on utilizing data, technology and information in new ways to solve some of the most challenging and complex issues facing society today.”
Mr. Cohen received a bachelor of arts degree in psychology from the University of California San Diego in 1977, a master’s degree in psychology at UCLA in 1978 and a doctorate in computer science and psychology from Stanford University in 1983.
The new school at Pitt is the first since the College of Business Administration was founded in 1995. It will enroll its first students this fall.