The Associate Dean for Research and Development, Joseph Kearney, oversees the development of external support for the College, as well as the College's research centers, institutes, and academic resource centers. He coordinates the College's participation in faculty development and internal research award programs. He also has responsibility for the College's infrastructure, including space assignment and renewal, equipment, technical support, and departmental general expense budgets and requests.

Dean Kearney earned his B.A. in psychology summa cum laude from the University of Minnesota. He went on to earn an M.A. in experimental psychology from the University of Texas before returning to Minnesota to take his M.S. and Ph.D. (1983) in computer science. He has been a member of the computer science faculty at Iowa since 1983. He served as chair of his department from 1993 to 1996 and as director of the School of Library and Information Science from 2000 to 2002. He has also served on a number of College and University committees, including the Council on Teaching and the CLAS Executive Committee.

Dean Kearney's current research focuses on behavior, scene, and scenario modeling for virtual environments. He co-directs the Hank Simulation Lab that houses a virtual bicycling simulator. With funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Center for Injury Prevention, he is investigating how virtual environments can be used as laboratories for the study of human behavior. He has also published research in psychophysics, computer vision, modeling of human movement, and computer animation. Dean Kearney's recent teaching has covered discrete structures, programming techniques and data structures, human computer interaction, and computer animation.

Associate Dean For Research and Development Contacts and Information