By Angela Jacob
For The Diamondback
The University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies welcomed a new dean Aug. 1.
Keith Marzullo, who came to the university from the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy — where he worked for about a year as the director of the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development program — said the information studies school itself attracted him.
“Our faculty is strong and cohesive: It’s a healthy, vibrant college with a broad set of interests,” he wrote in an email. The school is currently for graduates, though undergraduates will have access to classes beginning in the fall through a new information science degree.
Choosing a new dean is a formal endeavor that involves a search committee, usually made up of faculty, staff, students and a dean from another school, Provost Mary Ann Rankin said.
She noted that Marzullo was a special case — she actually held the position open for him.
The search committee had tried to fill the dean’s position a year ago, she said, but Marzullo wanted to complete his assignment at the White House. The information studies school appointed Brian Butler as an interim dean.
“Dr. Marzullo, I felt, was a really special and surprising candidate because he had such a strong background in computer science,” Rankin said. “He has contacts in so many different places that will serve the iSchool and the whole university well.”
He is also “highly regarded by the faculty and the committee,” she added.
Marzullo has worked closely with the interim dean to develop the new undergraduate major in information science, which will be available for the fall semester, Rankin said. One of his short-term goals is to ensure that the new undergraduate degree is launched and grown effectively.
In terms of a longer-term goal, Marzullo wrote that he wants to focus on “educating the students who will be innovating in this space as well as ensuring values such as privacy, safety and equal opportunity are addressed.”
Although he came to this university directly from the White House, this is not Marzullo’s first university position. Marzullo was a University of California, San Diego, faculty member for more than 20 years. For the last five years of his time there, he served as chair of the computer science and engineering department. He came to the East Coast in 2010 as a National Science Foundation division director before his White House position.
“My time at NSF and [the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy] … has made me interested in socio-technical aspects of systems: how we design and implement systems that work closely with and for people,” Marzullo wrote.
Jim Kurose, the NSF’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering division’s assistant director, said becoming a dean was a logical next step for Marzullo.
“It is fairly natural for university professors to come and do a rotation through a government position and then go back to academia,” said Kurose, Marzullo’s long-time colleague and NITRD co-chair. “He is a wonderful person, a great scientist and a very capable administrator as well, so he is sort of the whole package.”
Although Marzullo drew similarities between his work at the White House and his new position as dean, he emphasized that the latter hones in more on education.
“The most important difference for me … is having education being a main focus,” Marzullo wrote. “I’ve really missed working with students, and the energy, enthusiasm, curiosity and creativity that they bring.”
