As Summer Begins, Three Schools Welcome New Leadership
Earlier this month, Provost Patricia Easton announced new dean and director appointments for the Drucker School of Management, Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMS), and School of Community & Global Health (SCGH).
In a message to the university community, Easton said Associate Professor Katharina Pick will serve as interim dean of the Drucker School, which has been led for more than three years by Jenny Darroch who departs this month for a new role at Ohio’s Miami University. Professor Allon Percus succeeds Professor Henry Schellhorn as new IMS director. And Jay Orr, a longtime public health official in Riverside County and SCGH professor, takes over as SCGH dean from Alan Stacy, who held an interim position for more than a year.
“CGU is fortunate to have these accomplished individuals step into these roles,” Easton’s message said, “and I look forward to working with them.”
See below for a biographical description of each new appointee.
Clinical Associate Professor Katharina Pick has been a member of the Drucker School faculty since 2008. Her teaching and research focus on organizational behavior and leadership with an emphasis on gender and diversity, creating high performing teams, and the process of leadership development. She has played an integral role in reshaping the Drucker curriculum to reflect the Drucker Philosophy and practice-based learning. Her innovative Leadership Practicum is a critical element of the new Drucker Signature Platform and prepares students for leadership using interdisciplinary and behaviorally oriented learning modalities. As clinical faculty, she has provided both classroom instruction and individual coaching for developing leaders across a variety of programs including the Drucker Executive Program, the Getty Leadership Institute, and the California Police Chiefs Executive Leadership Institute. She received her PhD in Organizational Behavior and MA in Sociology from Harvard University and holds an MSW from University of Southern California.
Institute of Mathematical Sciences
Professor Allon Percus joined the university in January 2009. He is an applied mathematician whose diverse background has put him at the forefront of a field of mathematics with applications in the computational and physical sciences. His research combines discrete optimization and statistical physics, exploiting physical models and techniques to study the performance of algorithms on NP-hard problems. Together with Stefan Boettcher, he developed the method of Extremal Optimization that has since been applied to problems ranging from social networks to protein folding. From 2003 to 2006, Percus was associate director of the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) at UCLA, an institute established by the National Science Foundation to spark interactions between mathematicians and scientists from a broad range of fields. He was responsible for scientific oversight of many of IPAM’s activities, working in close collaboration with organizing committees across disciplines to create and run programs spreading the impact of mathematics throughout the sciences. Percus received his BA in Physics from Harvard in 1992 and his PhD from the Université Paris-Sud, Orsay, in 1997, after which he spent the first part of his scientific career as a technical staff member of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Information Sciences Group.
School of Community & Global Health
Professor Jay Orr joined Claremont Graduate University in 2017 as a Clinical Full Professor and the Director of Leadership & Management in the School of Community & Global Health. He earned a JD from the Ventura College of Law; a California Secondary Teaching Credential from the University of California, Santa Barbara Graduate School of Education; and a BA in political science from UCSB. He also attended the US Naval Academy in Annapolis. As the former Riverside County chief executive officer, he worked to improve healthcare and bring wellness to the top of the county’s agenda. Riverside is the 4th largest county in California and the 10th largest in the United States. It has approximately 23,000 employees and a budget of $5.4 billion. Orr brings over 34 years of public service experience. Prior to retiring from the position of CEO of Riverside County, he held other positions in Riverside County that include assistant district attorney, code enforcement director, and deputy public defender.
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