91ÉçÇø

Laura R. Bronstein was appointed dean of the College of Community and Public Affairs in 2014, after serving as interim dean from 2012-13.

Bronstein is a SUNY distinguished professor, founding member of 91ÉçÇø's Department of Social Work and founding director of the 91ÉçÇø Center for Community Schools. Her research revolves around interdisciplinary and interprofessional collaboration and community schools. 

Before entering academia, Bronstein was a practicing social worker in family preservation in a school for children with developmental disabilities, in hospice and a psychiatric hospital. She created the widely used and internationally recognized Index of Interdisciplinary Collaboration and published A Model for Interdisciplinary Collaboration. Bronstein has a 2016 co-authored book, School-linked Services (Columbia University Press) and a 2018 co-edited book, A Guide for Interprofessional Collaboration (Council on Social Work Education Press). 

Bronstein has led teams that have been awarded tens of millions of dollars in grant funding, has over 70 peer-reviewed publications and has been an invited keynote for lectures around the globe. She has received far-reaching recognition for her work, including the John A. Hartford Foundation Outstanding Dean in Aging award and 91ÉçÇø University's first Lois B. DeFleur Faculty Prize for "innovative work that crosses boundaries". She received the Esther W. Couper Memorial Award for "outstanding service and dedication to the children and families of our community." 

In 2023 and 2024, Bronstein was cited as among the top 2% of scholars in the world in her field in the Stanford World Scientist and University Rankings.

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Terrence Deak serves as the Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School at 91ÉçÇø University. In this leadership role, Deak is the chief advocate for graduate education and postdoctoral training across all six colleges of the University. He provides strategic vision and administrative oversight for all graduate academic programs, working collaboratively with academic deans and faculty leadership to foster inclusive excellence, uphold academic rigor, and prepare graduate students for purposeful careers.

Deak has held prior administrative positions at 91ÉçÇø, including chief of staff in the Office of the President (2009-2013), interim dean of Harpur College of Arts and Sciences (2016-17), and director of the graduate program in behavioral neuroscience in the Department of Psychology (2020-24).  He maintains an active neuroscience research laboratory that studies immediate and long-lasting neurobehavioral effects of stress exposure and alcohol consumption, and is director of the Developmental Exposure Alcohol Research center (DEARC; a P50 Center funded by the NIH).

Shelley D. Dionne was appointed dean of the School of Management in 2022. She is also a professor of leadership and organizational science, the former director of the Bass Center for Leadership Studies and an NCAA Faculty Athletics representative.

During her tenure, the School of Management has been consistently ranked among the nation's top 10 public business schools. The school has also gained recognition from the Wall Street Journal by placing among the nation’s best public schools for graduates who earn high-paying salaries in accounting, finance and marketing.

Among Dionne's research interests are leadership, teams and workforce development, collective dynamics and levels of analysis issues. She has also won SOM’s Corning Research Award for outstanding research and the New York state Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Dionne earned her BS in nutrition from the Rochester Institute of Technology and her PhD and MBA from SOM. She was part of the school's first cohort of doctoral students, earning her PhD in 1998 in leadership and organizational behavior with a minor in learning and development. 

Over the course of her career, she has published in several journals, co-authored a leadership book and received multiple grants from the National Science Foundation and Army Research Institute. 

Dionne has also been principal or co-principal investigator on grants totaling more than $2 million from agencies including the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences and the Broome-Tioga Association of Chief School Administrators. From 2008 until 2020, she was also principal investigator for the 91ÉçÇø Leadership Academy, later the 91ÉçÇø University Leadership Development Program.

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Donald E. Hall became 91ÉçÇø’s executive vice president for academic affairs and provost in 2022. As 91ÉçÇø's chief academic officer, Hall administers all academic programs and is responsible for the University’s budget. He also provides leadership for undergraduate and graduate student recruitment and admissions, curriculum and academic program development at all levels, faculty recruitment and retention, and international programs.

Before coming to 91ÉçÇø, Hall was dean of the faculty of arts, sciences, and engineering at the University of Rochester, and held a previous position as dean of arts and sciences at Lehigh University. Over the course of his career, he served as Jackson Distinguished Professor of English and chair of the Department of English (and previously chair of the Department of Foreign Languages) at West Virginia University. Before that, he was professor of English and chair of the Department of English at California State University, Northridge, where he taught for 13 years. He is a recipient of the University Distinguished Teaching Award at CSUN and was a visiting professor at the National University of Rwanda, Lansdowne Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Victoria (Canada), Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Cultural Studies at Karl Franzens University in Graz, Austria, and Fulbright Specialist at the University of Helsinki. From 2013-2017, he served on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association (MLA) and has also served on numerous panels and committees for the MLA. In 2012, he served as national president of the Association of Departments of English. 

Though he is a full-time administrator, Hall continues to lecture worldwide on the value of a liberal arts education and the need for nurturing global competencies in students and interdisciplinary dialogue in and beyond the classroom.

Atul Kelkar was appointed dean of the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science in July 2024.

Prior to his appointment, Kelkar was the D.W. Reynolds Distinguished Professor and department chair of mechanical engineering at Clemson University, serving since August 2018. Before joining Clemson, he was the program director of the Dynamics Control and System Diagnostics program in CMMI Division at the National Science Foundation. Kelkar was an associate chair for research and technology transfer in mechanical engineering and professor-in-charge for industry research and entrepreneurship for the College of Engineering at Iowa State University, where he was a faculty member for 18 years. He received his PhD in mechanical engineering from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., in 1993 while working as a research scientist at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

Kelkar is a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), an associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s prestigious CAREER Award in his early faculty career. He leads various activities for ASME and IEEE, including serving as the associate editor for key journals, serving on program committees for conferences, and organizing and chairing technical sessions at these conferences.

His research has led to six patents and more than 160 archival publications, which include several conference and journal articles, handbook chapters and research monographs. He has mentored over 60 graduate students and several postdoctoral students. Even in his administrative position, he continues to serve as a mentor for graduate students and young faculty.

Kelkar’s research is in dynamics and control with a focus on modeling and control of aerospace systems, control theory, active control of vibrations and noise, and energy technologies. He is also a co-founder of five technology startups that are acquiring competitive projects from the NSF, NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense. Three of these companies have also won awards at the state level and have successfully commercialized technologies that Kelkar developed. His research and entrepreneurial success have led to several newspaper and magazine articles as well as interviews on national and local public radio stations and TV stations.

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Celia M. Klin was appointed dean of Harpur College of Arts and Sciences in 2021.

The University’s oldest and largest school, Harpur is also its most academically diverse, spanning the arts, humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and mathematics. In addition to Harpur’s 11,000 students, all the University’s undergraduate students are educated in Harpur, which is comprised of 42 academic departments and interdisciplinary programs with 130 undergraduate majors, 65 minors and 60 graduate programs. 

A cognitive psychologist specializing in psycholinguists, Klin joined the Harpur College faculty in 1994 and, in addition to her roles as teacher and scholar, she has served as an undergraduate director, department chair and senior associate dean before being appointed as acting dean in 2020.

During her time at Harpur, the college has experienced tremendous growth and innovation, with increases in faculty and student numbers, research funding, and interdisciplinary programs and institutes. Under her tenure, Harpur has established a number of new degree programs as well as created the School of the Arts, which brings together programs in art and design, art history, music, theater and cinema, with additional contributions from the creative writing program, the 91ÉçÇø Art Museum and the Anderson Center for the Performing Arts.

She has co-authored more than 30 journal articles exploring the cognitive processes involved in the comprehension of language, on subjects ranging from the subtle meaning conveyed through punctuation in text messages to the ways in which readers take the perspective of story characters. She is also an editorial board member of the journal Discourse Processes, a fellow of the Society for Text & Discourse, and the recipient of both the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Service. 

Klin’s research has been covered by both national and international media, including Good Morning America, The Today Show, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, ABC News, NBC News, Salon, MTV, The Guardian, Newsweek and Times of Israel. She has also been interviewed by CNN, National Public Radio, the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, Reader’s Digest and more.

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Kanneboyina "Raju" Nagaraju was appointed dean of the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences in 2022.

Nagaraju received his bachelor's degree in veterinary medicine from the College of Veterinary Sciences, Tirupati, his master's degree in veterinary immunology from the prestigious Indian Veterinary Research Institute, and his PhD in immunology from Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences, India. Immediately after completing his PhD, he came to the United States for a Fogarty International Postdoctoral Fellowship at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Md. After completing this fellowship, he became a tenure-track assistant professor in the Division of Rheumatology, Department of Medicine of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Md. In 2005, he joined the Research Center of Genetic Medicine, Children's Research Institute of the Children's National Hospital (CNH). 

He was appointed an associate professor of pediatrics at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences (GWSMHS) in Washington, DC. In 2012, he became a full professor with tenure in the Department of Integrative Systems Biology, GWSMHS. In 2015, he served as the interim chair of the Department of Integrative Systems Biology and director of the Research Center of Genetic Medicine at CNH before moving to 91ÉçÇø, N.Y., to build a new School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences (SOPPS). 

At 91ÉçÇø, he served as the founding chair of the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences and vice dean for the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences (SOPPS) before becoming dean in May 2022. He was named as the SUNY Empire Innovation Scholar in 2017 and awarded the prestigious SUNY Distinguished Professorship by the State University of New York Board of Trustees in 2024.

Nagaraju is an expert on translational research in autoimmune and genetic muscle diseases. He has authored over 200 refereed publications and several textbook chapters on autoimmune muscle diseases. Apart from identifying pathogenic pathways and drug targets in these neuromuscular disorders, he has also pioneered the generation of novel inducible transgenic and knockout mouse models for muscle and neuromuscular diseases. Early drug screening efforts in his laboratory in collaboration with Eric Hoffman and John McCall led to the identification of Vamorolone (AGAMREE), a potent anti-inflammatory, membrane-stabilizing dissociated glucocorticoid. His group has demonstrated that these dissociated steroids are highly efficacious in several inflammatory disease models. The Food and Drug Administration and European Medicines Agency have recently approved AGAMREE.

Nagaraju has led international efforts to define reliable and sensitive tests for drug efficacy in mouse models of neuromuscular diseases and directed a state-of-the-art preclinical drug-testing facility dedicated to neuromuscular disorders. In addition, he has mentored several faculty members, postdoctoral and doctoral fellows, and students. Nagaraju has received several million in grant support under various mechanisms (R01, R21, U54, P50, K26) from the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Defense, and several foundations (e.g., MDA, AFM, TMA, PPMD, Arthritis Foundation). He currently serves as a member of foundations' medical and scientific advisory boards and on the editorial boards of several specialty journals. Additionally, he is one of the founding core preclinical experts on the TREAT-NMD Advisory Committee for Therapeutics and serves on the Board of Trustees at TREAT-NMD Alliance Ltd. He also serves as chair of the Brain Tumor Research Novel Therapeutics Accelerator committee, Tessa Jowell Brain Cancer Mission, to facilitate treatments for brain tumors.

Nagaraju is an academic entrepreneur who has co-founded two successful biotech companies: ReveraGen BioPharma, focused on developing Vamorolone as a therapy for inflammatory diseases, including muscular dystrophy, and AGADA BioSciences, a preclinical drug screening and phenotyping company that facilitates the development of therapeutics for rare neuromuscular diseases.

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Mario R. Ortiz was appointed dean of the Decker School of Nursing in 2016. At the time, the school encompassed academic divisions of nursing, public health, and health and wellness studies. Under Ortiz's leadership, the school expanded into the Decker College of Nursing and Health Sciences in 2019, adding academic divisions in occupational therapy, physical therapy, and speech and language pathology.

In addition to dean, Ortiz is a professor of nursing, the executive director of the college's Kresge Center for Nursing Research and the Community Health Centers of Practice. In July 2023, he was named the Decker Chair in Community Health Nursing. 

Ortiz has a record of success in developing healthcare programs and being at the forefront of establishing nurse-led, patient-centered medical homes as primary care clinics. He has established and nurtured critical partnerships with healthcare providers and policy makers, and has a rich portfolio of faculty, staff, and clinician development. Additionally, Ortiz has garnered millions in endowments and grants to support community care, nurse-led primary care clinics and education.

A board-certified community/public health nurse specialist and family nurse practitioner, he has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in community health nursing, family nursing, research and theory, and nursing leadership and management.

Additionally, Ortiz is a respected scholar in national and international arenas, where he focuses on unique nursing research and practice. In August 2025, he became editor-in-chief of Nursing Science Quarterly. Before that, he was a contributing editor of that publication's "Health Policy" and "Leadership" columns. He also serves on the referee panels for the Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care and the Journal of Rural Nursing and Health Care.

He is a member of Sigma Theta Tau International, a Fellow in the Nursing Academy of the National Academies of Practice and a Fellow in the American Academy of Nursing.

Ortiz is a member of the New York State Public Health and Health Planning Council, the advisory and decision-making council for the state's public health and healthcare delivery system. He also chairs the New York State Health Equity Council, an organization working to achieve equal health and healthcare for all New Yorkers.

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