Wailoo named vice dean of Wilson School

Professor of history and public affairs Keith Wailoo has been named vice dean of the Wilson School, effective July 1, 2013, Wilson School dean Cecilia Rouse announced in a statement on March 14.

“I’m very excited to be working with Keith and I think he’ll make a magnificent vice dean,” Rouse said in an interview with the Daily Princetonian.

As vice dean, Wailoo will oversee the Wilson School’s academic operations. His duties will include deciding which courses to offer, assigning faculty to the courses they will be teaching, hiring new faculty and making arrangements for visiting faculty.

Wailoo said he is excited to work with “a remarkably diverse and strong faculty, and building on the school’s reputation for excellence in interdisciplinary education for leadership in public and international affairs.”

Following the end of the Wilson School’s selective admission process for the Class of 2015, Wailoo said that as vice dean he would implement new reforms to the program while working closely with both the School’s undergraduate and graduate leadership.

This implementation will involve a close examination of the policy areas in which incoming concentrators are interested, Rouse and Wailoo said, and will impact administrators’ decisions about what courses to offer and what faculty members to assign to those courses.

“We don’t fully understand which students are coming in and what they’re interested in,” Rouse explained. “Sometimes students have interests in one area, and we have to think creatively in terms of how to fulfill those interests.”

In appointing the vice dean in consultation with the Dean of Faculty, Rouse said she looked for several qualities, including levelheadedness, an ability to get along well with the dean, staff and faculty and a capacity to think strategically about the Wilson School. Wailoo, she said, “has all of these qualities in spades.”

Rebecca Dresner ’13, who took WWS 354: Modern Genetics and Public Policy, a course co-taught last semester by Wailoo and University president Shirley Tilghman, described him as “well-read, confident and approachable.” Dresner added that Wailoo’s eloquence and responsiveness to students are qualities that will help in his duties as vice dean.

“That’ll be great for the classes he’s going to make in the future for the Woodrow Wilson School,” she said.

Wailoo is jointly appointed in the Wilson School and in the history department. He has written several award-winning books on the history and cultural politics of disease, health policy in the U.S. and race, ethnicity and health.

Prior to coming to Princeton in 2010, Wailoo taught history and social medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Rutgers University. He holds a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Yale as well as a Ph.D. in history and sociology of science from the University of Pennsylvania.