Ryan Named Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs

Message from the Dean

April 12, 2013

I am pleased to announce that Gery Ryan will be joining the school’s staff as our new Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs.

Gery brings to his new position a broad and in-depth understanding of the graduate school, its mission and its operations. He has been involved with the Pardee School for over a decade playing a variety of roles, including: professor, interim Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs in 2010, faculty lead for the PRGS reaccreditation; member of the FCCA and faculty and section lead for first year qualifying exams.

Among the first-year core courses, Gery teaches Introduction to Policy Analysis (with Jeffrey Wasserman), Case Studies in Policy Analysis, and the anthropology segment of the Social and Behavioral Science I. Gery has taught elective courses on qualitative methods, enthnographic methods and text analysis, as well as a providing a range of tutorials and independent study courses.

Trained as a medical anthropologist, Gery has conducted research on decision-making processes, ethnographies of health care and education systems, and the integration of qualitative and quantitative methodologies. As a methodologist, Gery specializes in applying systemic methods to qualitative research and designing tools for formative, process, and summative evaluations.

Gery’s diverse research portfolio covers areas that are central to the types of policy problems that many students will address at PRGS and in their subsequent careers. In his 12-year career at RAND, he has a large portfolio of projects and has done work in health, education, and national security and has focused on topics including HIV/AIDS, mental health, obesity/nutrition, end-of-life care, patient safety, homelessness, domestic violence, healthcare cost and efficiency, medical manpower, and social networks.

In addition to a large body of work in the United States, he has worked extensively in Africa and Latin America on health-related issues and in the Middle East on education-related projects. Gery is also Director of the RAND Summer Associates Program and Director of the RAND African First Ladies Initiative.

Please join me in congratulating Gery and in thanking our search committee — Rachel Swanger (chair), Emmett Keeler, Lisa Meredith, Johanna Zmud, David Johnson, and Anne Boustead — and all of those who applied for consideration as Assistant Dean. Their support of the school and our students is sincerely appreciated.

—Susan