Bios
Paul Courant, Dean of Libraries
Paul N. Courant is University Librarian and Dean of Libraries, Harold T. Shapiro Collegiate Professor of Public Policy, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, Professor of Economics and Professor of Information at the University of Michigan. From 2002-2005 he served as Provost and Executive Vice-President for Academic Affairs, the chief academic officer and the chief budget officer of the University. He has also served as the Associate Provost for Academic and Budgetary Affairs, Chair of the Department of Economics and Director of the Institute of Public Policy Studies (which is now the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy). In 1979 and 1980 he was a Senior Staff Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers.
Courant has authored half a dozen books, and over seventy papers covering a broad range of topics in economics and public policy, including tax policy, state and local economic development, gender differences in pay, housing, radon and public health, relationships between economic growth and environmental policy, and university budgeting systems. More recently, his academic work has considered the economics of universities, the economics of libraries and archives, and the effects of new information technologies and other disruptions on scholarship, scholarly publication, and academic libraries.
Paul Courant holds a BA in History from Swarthmore College (1968); an MA in Economics from Princeton University (1973); and a PhD in Economics from Princeton University (1974).
Christopher Kendall, Dean, School of Music, Theatre & Dance
From 1996 to 2005 Christopher Kendall was Director of the University of Maryland School of Music, Theatre & Dance. Prior to 1996, he was associate conductor of the Seattle Symphony (1987–1993) then director of the Music Division and Tanglewood Institute of the Boston University School of the Arts. Since 1975 he has been the conductor and artistic director of the 20th CenturyConsort, ensemble-in-residence at the Smithsonian Institution, and since 1978 founder and lutenist of the Folger Consort, early music ensemble-in-residence at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Kendall has been guest conductor with the Seattle Symphony, the Dayton Philharmonic, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony (Ontario), the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, the New York Chamber Symphony; the Annapolis Symphony; the Da Capo Chamber Players, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Collage and Dinosaur Annex (both new music ensembles in Boston), the Orchestra, Symphony and Chamber Orchestra of The Juilliard School and the Musica Nova Ensemble at the Eastman School.
Kendall is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Emmy and the Washington Area Music (Wammie) Awards, 1984, 1987 and 1989, with the 20th Century Consort; the Woolson Award, 1989, with the Folger Consort; and the Smithson Award, 1992, with the 20th Century Consort. His performances can be heard in recording on the ASV, Centaur, Bard, Delos, CRI, Nonesuch, and Smithsonian Collection labels.
David C. Munson, Jr., Dean, College of Engineering
David C. Munson, Jr., assumed the position of Robert J. Vlasic Dean of Engineering at the University of Michigan on July 1, 2006. Prior to becoming Dean, Munson was Chair of U-M’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Munson received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering (with distinction) from the University of Delaware in 1975, and the M.S., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1977, 1977, and 1979, respectively. From 1979 to 2003 he was with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Research Professor in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, and a faculty member in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.
Professor Munson’s teaching and research interests are in the general area of signal and image processing. His current research is focused on radar imaging, passive millimeter-wave imaging, and computer tomography. He has held summer positions in digital communications and speech processing, and he has served as a consultant in synthetic aperture radar to the Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory. He is co-founder of InstaRecon, Inc., a start-up to commercialize fast algorithms for image formation in computer tomography. He is affiliated with the Infinity Project, where he is coauthor of a textbook on the digital world, which is used in about 200 high schools nationwide to introduce students to engineering.
Professor Munson is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a past president of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, founding editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, and co-founder of the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing. In addition to multiple teaching awards and other honors, he was presented the Society Award of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, he served as a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, he received an IEEE Third Millennium Medal, and he was the Texas Instruments Distinguished Visiting Professor at Rice University. Prior to joining the University of Michigan, he was the Robert C. MacClinchie Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois.
Monica Ponce de Leon, Dean, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning
Professor Ponce de Leon received a Bachelor of Architecture degree in 1989 from the University of Miami and the Master of Architecture in Urban Design degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1991.
She joined the Harvard Graduate School of Design faculty in 1996, following appointments on the faculties of University of Miami, Northeastern University, and Georgia Institute of Technology. She has held visiting professorships at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and the Rhode Island School of Design. She has received honors from the Architectural League of New York (Emerging Voices, 2003, and Young Architects Award, 1997) and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (Award in Architecture, 2002). Her practice has received over 30 design awards, among which are the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award (2007), the AIA/LA Design Award (Helios House, 2007), the I.D. Magazine Award: Environment (2007) and the AIA/ALA Library Building Award (2007) for the Fleet Library at the Rhode Island School of Design, and ten Progressive Architecture Awards. Most recently Office dA was awarded the American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment’s (COTE) Top Ten Green Projects for 2008 for the Macallen Building in Boston.
Among her authored works are numerous articles in U.S. and international publications on topics ranging from Latin American architecture to eco-tourism to public infrastructure for the tropics.
The portfolio of Monica Ponce de Leon’s firm, Office dA, includes institutional, residential, commercial, housing, governmental, industrial design and urban design projects all over the world. Among the more recent are the Fleet Library at Rhode Island School of Design, the Tongxian Arts Center in Beijing, Helios House/Rebranding of a Gas Station in Los Angeles, an Intergenerational Housing Center for the City of Chicago, a dynamic low-cost housing for the Elemental program in Chile, the first LEED certified large residential project in Boston and a border station between the U.S. and Canada.
Bryan Rogers, Dean, School of Art & Design
Bryan Rogers served as head of the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University from 1988 through 1999. Prior to that, he was professor of art at San Francisco State University, where he founded the Conceptual Design Program. Rogers has also held appointments at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at M.I.T. and the University of California at Berkeley. From 1982 to 1985, he was editor of the international art-science-technology journal Leonardo. He completed a year of post-graduate work at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich on a fellowship from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst. He has also held fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
At Carnegie Mellon, Rogers led the development of a number of innovative programs in art and design, stressing the importance of connections to other fields of inquiry. As founding director of the Studio for Creative Inquiry, an interdisciplinary outreach center dedicated to fostering ambitious, experimental, advanced-technology projects in the arts, he significantly strengthened Carnegie Mellon's interactions with regional and international communities. He also served as principal investigator on major NSF and NASA supported projects.
At Michigan, Rogers has led the complete restructuring of the educational programs within the School of Art and Design. A major thrust of this effort has been to firmly engage the School with the University and the broader community, both local and global. Focused on creative work and infused with contemporary information and imaging technologies, the new programs endeavor to unite the domains of art-making and designing.
In addition to his administrative accomplishments, Rogers is a sculptor and installation artist whose work has been widely exhibited in the U.S. and internationally. His work explores conceptual intersections of art, science and technology, often manifesting in complex, interactive installations of kinetic objects.
Theresa Reid, Executive Director
As the Executive Director at the University of Michigan, first of Arts on Earth, then of ArtsEngine, Theresa Reid has worked closely with the dean-directors and faculty from across campus, developing and launching an ambitious set of projects. These include WorkPlay, an interdisciplinary, campus-wide design competition; annual “ArtsLabs” — interdisciplinary, experiential, arts-driven learning events; “Creative Process,” an undergraduate interdisciplinary studio-lecture course; “Living Arts,” ArtsEngine’s living-learning community; and the Undergraduate Creativity Research Project (UCRP), a consortium of research faculty from 10 different U-M units. Reid’s University service includes active membership on the Public Goods Council, the Research Impacts Team, the Communicators Forum, the Arts Communicators Forum, the Provostal task force on Non-Traditional Educational Programming at U-M, and the review panel for faculty grants from Arts at Michigan.
In prior work, Reid was the first Executive Director of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children (APSAC), where over ten years she steadily grew the organization’s membership, status, and influence nationally. Reid was instrumental in building the organization’s membership from 200 to more than 5000; developing its Board of Directors, committees, task forces, and state chapter network; developing and managing its professional training series, including four large national conferences; and establishing and editing a series of highly regarded publications, including the journal Child Maltreatment (Sage Publications). Reid spoke regularly at regional and national conferences on a range of issues in child maltreatment, and served on federal panels and other national bodies pertaining to child maltreatment practice, research, and legislation. Through a grant from the Soros Foundation’s Open Society Initiative, Reid has taught seminars in organizational development and media coverage of child sexual abuse to social service professionals in Eastern Europe.
Reid also served for three years as the first President of the Board of the Chicago Children’s Advocacy Center (CCAC), a special project of Mayor Richard M. Daley, directing Board development; overseeing construction of the CCAC’s first facility; directing the production of policies and procedures governing Board operations and staff oversight; and directing the creation of CCAC’s first strategic plan.
Reid is the author of Two Little Girls: A Memoir of Adoption, published in April 2006 and 2007 by the Penguin Group. She is a contributing editor to The APSAC Handbook on Child Maltreatment (Sage, 1996; 2002), and has published in The New York Review of Books, Adoptive Families, Literary Mama, and elsewhere. Reid earned her PhD in English from the University of Chicago in 2001, completing a dissertation entitled “An Ethical Analysis of Discourse on Child Sexual Abuse from 1860 to the Present” under the direction of Wayne Booth, then Gerald Graff.
