On March 23, 2022 President Cornish announced Melanie Stein as provost of Ithaca College, after serving as interim provost since August 2021. Prior to that Stein was the Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences since July 2019 and in that time has provided trusted leadership and worked collaboratively to strengthen school identity, recruit talented and diverse faculty, and support faculty development, student success, and curricular innovation.
Prior to coming to Ithaca College, Stein had served as dean of academic affairs at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut since 2016. She joined Trinity as a faculty member in the Department of Mathematics in 1995. In addition to those roles, Stein also served as interim dean of faculty and as an associate academic dean.
Prior to joining Trinity, Stein taught for three years at the Ohio State University. She was the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship as well as a NATO-NSF postdoctoral fellowship, during which she spent a year at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität in Frankfurt, Germany.
As a mathematician she works in geometric group theory, studying groups through their actions on topological metric spaces. She is a leading expert in the study of Thompson’s groups, and her work generalizing Morgan-Shalen theory to essential laminations has led to groundbreaking results on the (non)existence of foliations in 3-manifolds.
Born and raised in Ithaca, Stein received an A.B. in mathematics from Harvard College and an M.S. and Ph.D. in mathematics from Cornell University.
Learn more about the Office of the Provost here.