UCLA is one of the world's premier universities. At the core of the university's research programs, graduate training, and undergraduate instruction is the UCLA College of Letters and Science.

Dean of Humanities

Tim Stowell, a 25-year veteran of the College's Department of Linguistics and a noted syntactician, was named dean of the university's division of humanities on September 1, 2006.

Tim has risen through the ranks of the linguistics department, which he joined in 1981 as an assistant professor. The department is considered by linguistics specialists to be at the very top of its field. Stowell has distinguished himself in the branch of linguistics that explores how meaning is related to grammatical representation. In his early work, he pioneered the research of deriving generalizations in word order for specific languages.

Tim has served twice as department chair: from 1994-98, and from 2004 until his appointment as dean.

Tim has served in visiting professorships at 13 universities and summer institutes in the United States, Europe and Asia. He is the current co-editor of Syntax and has been a longtime participant on the editorial boards of five other publications in his field.

Dean of Life Sciences

Environmental biologist Victoria Sork became dean of life sciences on September 1, 2009. Victoria is a professor in the UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and in the university's Institute of the Environment. She is a pioneer in the field of landscape genetics, an area that integrates genomics, evolutionary biology and conservation.

Victoria came to UCLA in 2000 and served as a special assistant to the chancellor for academic initiatives after serving as an American Council for Education fellow-in-residence on campus. Her faculty appointments began in January 2002.

Prior to coming to UCLA, Victoria was a professor at the University of Missouri–St Louis, where she founded the International Center for Tropical Ecology. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and earned her bachelor's degree in science with honors from UC Irvine.

Dean of Physical Sciences

Joseph Rudnick is dean of the Division of Physical Sciences. The former chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Joe has served on the UCLA faculty since 1984, when he joined the faculty in the Department of Physics in 1984 as a full professor. His research focuses on condensed-matter physics; his recent work has explored problems in biological physics.

Joe has been active in academic leadership, both within the College and in university-wide administration. From 1986-89, he was chair of his department, and he began his current term as chair in 2004. He has also served on several university-wide committees, including the Committee on Academic Personnel from 1994-97; he was vice chair of the committee in 1996 and 1997.

Dean of Social Sciences

Alessandro "Sandro" Duranti is dean of the Division of Social Sciences, the largest academic division in the College.

Sandro has been a member of UCLA's anthropology faculty for more than two decades. He has served for the past two years as the department's chair and for the past decade as director of the UCLA Center for Language, Interaction, and Culture. His research interests include political discourse, language as a non-neutral medium and the role of improvisation in jazz, speechmaking and everyday interaction.

Sandro is a past recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the UCLA Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award and the American Anthropological Association/Mayfield Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching of Anthropology. In 2008, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been president of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, and the editor of two journals: Pragmatics and the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology.

Dean/Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education

Judi came to UCLA in the fall of 1969 as an Assistant Professor in Physiological Science. Early in her career, she was recognized for innovative teaching, and in 1973, she received a UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award - the second woman to achieve this honor at UCLA. She was the Chair of her Department for five years (1980-85) and was one of the founders of the undergraduate Neuroscience program (established in 1991). Her research on spinal cord physiology and limb dynamics was continuously funded by NIH for 27 years, and she received a Javits Neuroscience Research Award in 1990. She served as the Chair of UCLA's Academic Senate in 1994-95.

Judi was selected to be the first Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education in 1996. In this post, she is responsible for many programs that foster innovation in undergraduate education, including General Education, College Honors, the Student Research Programs, the Writing II Program, UCLA's student diversity programs, and the Office of Instructional Development. Judi served as acting executive dean of the UCLA College from July 2003 to July 2004.