UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — David Hall, dean of the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), has announced he will be concluding his deanship at the end of the academic year in May 2014.
“I very much appreciate the support and encouragement I have received during the past four years that I have served as dean,” Hall said. “In the next eight months, we have a number of tasks remaining, and I look forward to working with my colleagues in the College of IST on these endeavors.”
A professor of information sciences and technology, Hall will return to the faculty ranks and take a sabbatical in the fall of 2014. He will return in a full-time faculty role through the end of the 2015-16 academic year.
Hall was named interim dean in November 2009 and appointed dean of the college in September 2010.
“During the past few months in getting to know Dave, I've come to realize the depth of his commitment to the advancement of the faculty, staff and students,” said Penn State Vice President and Provost Nicholas P. Jones.
Jones will announce plans for conducting a national search for Hall’s successor in the near future.
Hall is founding director of Penn State's Center for Network-Centric Cognition and Information Fusion (NC2IF), which focuses on the gap between the collection data in computer systems and the knowledge and decisions in the minds of computer users.
Hall created the center to harness what he called the overwhelming flood of information available today and to make it useful for decision-making at all levels. He spearheaded the efforts for NC2IF to gain University center status and win funding from the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and other sources.
Hall joined the College of IST in 2001. He first served as associate dean for research and graduate programs. In that capacity, he was responsible for overseeing the college’s doctoral and master's degree programs, as well as research grant administration and leadership of faculty research efforts.
During his tenure as dean, the College of IST has significantly grown its online education program, reaching a current level of 500 degree-seeking students for the online undergraduate majors in Information Sciences and Technology (IST) and Security and Risk Analysis (SRA) and 250 graduate students pursuing master of professional studies in cybersecurity, homeland security and enterprise architecture. The college also added new tenure-track faculty, increased the size of the resident graduate doctoral program and recruited a new chaired professor focused on big data and medical informatics. His other accomplishments as dean include the creation of the new research Center for Online Innovation in Learning (COIL) in collaboration with the College of Education and the World Campus.
He has more than 35 years of experience in research, research management and systems development. He is the author of more than 200 journal articles and papers, reports, books and book chapters, and he has lectured internationally on multi-sensor data fusion, artificial intelligence, and research management and technology forecasting.
Hall also has industrial experience including directing independent research and development, leading a software signal processing group at Raytheon Corporation (HRB Division), managing the navigation analysis section at the Computer Sciences Corporation, and serving as a staff scientist at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
Prior to joining the College of IST, he served as associate director and senior scientist at Penn State’s Applied Research Laboratory, where he oversaw an interdisciplinary team of 175 scientists and engineers in conducting research in information science, navigation research, systems automation and communications science.
Hall received his bachelor's degree in math and physics from the University of Iowa and his master’s degree and doctorate in astronomy from Penn State.