Dean and associate provost at Rutgers from 1988-1994, Stein has spent the last year as professor of psychobiology on the Newark campus and adjunct professor of neurology at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. At Rutgers, he administered 14 graduate and professional degree programs with an enrollment of approximately 1,200 students. Prior to his position at Rutgers, Stein was professor of psychology and director of the Brain Research Laboratory at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., as well as professor of neurology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
An active research scientist in the area of recovery from injury to the brain, Stein is the author of more than 140 journal articles and has written and edited 14 books and monographs on the subject. He is founder and editor of the journal "Restorative Neurology and Neuro-science" (RNN) published by Elservier, Amsterdam. His most recent book, Brain Repair, in collaboration with Simon Brailowsky of the University of Mexico and Bruno Will of the Universite Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, France, will be published this spring by Oxford University Press.
Stein earned his doctoral degree in psychology from the University of Oregon; he also held a National Institutes of Health-funded postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar at Claude Bernard University in Lyon, France.
The search committee for the dean of the Graduate School, chaired by Dobbs Professor of History Tom Burns, sifted through the files of more than 160 applicants before making a recommendation to the president. Burns characterized the applicant pool as "very broad and very deep."
Provost Billy Frye said, "In Don Stein we have someone with outstanding credentials both as a scholar and as an academic administrator. It strikes me as especially significant to have someone with these credentials at the helm of the Graduate School, which symbolizes the University's commitment to excellence in scholarship. We are delighted that Dr. Stein will be joining us in the fall."
Stein's appointment at Emory is effective Sept. 1.
Frye further noted that "the Graduate School has made great progress under the leadership of George Jones over the past six years. Many specific evidences of that progress could be noted -- a 105 percent growth in the budget; TATTO (Emory's distinctive graduate teaching assistant training program); several new graduate degree programs; and an increase of more than 30 percent in the number of first-year graduate students, to name a few. But the most important change has been in the quality of our programs and our students. That's what a graduate school should be about -- excellence in scholarship. So again, as George returns to regular faculty status, I want again to express my deep appreciation and admiration for what he and his colleagues in the Graduate School have accomplished."
-- Nancy M. Spitler