Deborah Eastman was appointed Interim Dean of the Faculty August 1, 2026 after serving as the Associate Dean of the Faculty for Faculty Affairs (ADoFA) since July 2022. The highest ranking officer after the President, the Dean of the Faculty is responsible for providing academic leadership for the College and its faculty. The dean provides leadership for the College’s educational mission, supports faculty development, and ensures the quality of the College curriculum. The dean is responsible for overseeing all academic departments, programs, and interdisciplinary centers; stewarding the appointment, promotion, and tenure of individual faculty members; identifying new chairs and program directors; reviewing the faculty compensation program; supporting the work of teaching and learning that takes place outside the classroom, and administering the academic budget.

Deborah brings significant college leadership experience to this role, having supported department chairs and faculty committees as well as new faculty in her work as Associate Dean. Prior to serving as Associate Dean of the Faculty, she served as Department Chair of Biology and as a co-coordinator for Full Participation and a Divisional Fellow in the Center for the Critical Study of Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE). In these roles she co-led the development of the new Social Difference and Power curricular requirement at the College and organized events for the CCSRE: STEM partnership on the theme SYZYGY. SYZYGY programming generated an open discussion of scholarly work that undertakes critical examinations of race, ethnicity, and social difference in relationship to science and math.

Professor Eastman’s academic studies focus on the conversations that cells have during embryonic development. She and her students have used cellular, computational, genetic, and molecular approaches to examine the signaling pathways and transcriptional regulatory mechanisms that are critical to cell specialization.