David Gerdes

Case Western Reserve University President Eric W. Kaler and Provost Joy K. Ward announced today that David Gerdes, a renowned physics scholar and department chair from University of Michigan, will become dean of the College of Arts and Sciences on March 1.

Gerdes, the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Physics and a professor of astronomy, has served on the University of Michigan faculty since 1998 and as chair of the physics department since 2019. He also serves as chair of the Michigan Society of Fellows, which promotes interdisciplinary scholarship across the university.

During his tenure as department chair, Gerdes has focused on recruiting and promoting faculty, modernizing and enhancing the curriculum, increasing donor support, expanding research opportunities for undergraduates, and strengthening the department’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. In addition, he recently worked closely with the leadership of University of Michigan’s research division, College of Engineering, and College of Literature, Science and the Arts to establish an interdisciplinary Quantum Research Institute, which has received $36 million in university funding so far.

“The College of Arts and Sciences is a core piece of the Case Western Reserve experience, and it demands an exceptional leader,” said President Eric W. Kaler. “I am eager to support David as he works to bolster the impressive breadth of education, research, scholarship and creative endeavors taking place across the college.”

Gerdes has earned the University of Michigan’s highest awards for excellence in undergraduate teaching and is especially known for his inclusion of undergraduate students in his renowned research.

For the past decade, Gerdes has researched small-body populations throughout the solar system, with an emphasis on Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids and the region beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper Belt. He and his team use machine learning to extract very distant, faint, moving objects from images acquired from large telescopes—leading to the discovery of hundreds of new solar system objects. He discovered the possible dwarf planet 2014 UZ224, nicknamed DeeDee, which at the time of its discovery was the second-most-distant known object in the solar system, and he is the namesake of asteroid 208117 Davidgerdes. Gerdes began his career as a high-energy physicist and contributed to the discovery of the top quark, the heaviest known elementary particle, for which he was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

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