The College of Letters & Science is made up of four distinct divisions: the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts; the Division of Mathematical, Life, and Physical Sciences; the Division of Social Sciences and the Division of Undergraduate Education. Each of our divisions is led by a senior administrator.
Pierre Wiltzius
Executive Dean and Dean of Science
Pierre Wiltzius is the Susan and Bruce Worster Dean of Science and Professor of Physics. Prior to his arrival at UC Santa Barbara, he was the Director of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and Physics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He joined Lucent Technologies - Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T Bell Laboratories) in 1984 and eventually became the director of semiconductor physics research. His research interests include soft condensed matter and complex fluids. His current research is focused on developing new fabrication techniques for photonic crystals, including colloidal self-assembly and multi-beam interference lithography. Wiltzius received the degree of Diplomphysiker in 1976 and the degree of Dr. sc. nat. in 1981 from the E.T.H. (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) Zurich, Switzerland. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Physics Department at UC Santa Barbara from 1982 to 1984.
John Majewski
Dean of humanities and fine arts
John Majewski is the Michael Douglas Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts and professor in the Department of History, where he has taught since 1995. He has been an Associate Dean for the division for the past two years and served as the History Department Chair from 2009 to 2012. Majewski was a member of the Letters & Science Faculty Executive Committee and the Committee on Research, and served for five years on the campus Program Review Panel. He earned his Ph.D. from UCLA, where he won the Allan Nevins Prize in American Economic History for the best dissertation on an American subject. He also received a Howard Foundation Mid-Career Fellowship, the Hubbell Prize for an article on Civil War History, and an Andrew Mellon Research Fellowship from the Virginia Historical Society. His areas of specialization include American economic, social, and legal history; Southern history, and the U.S. Civil War. Dr. Majewski earned the Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award in 2003. He is the author of numerous books, articles, reviews, and book chapters.
Charles Hale
dean of social sciences
Charles Hale is the SAGE Sara Miller McCune Dean of Social Sciences as well as a professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Global Studies. He is a leading social science scholar whose research bridges multiple disciplines, with a focus on race and ethnicity, racism, social movements and identity politics among Black and indigenous peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean. He is highly regarded for his innovations in collaborative approaches, which characterize not only his research and teaching, but his administrative leadership as well. Hale, who previously taught at the University of Texas, Austin, is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship for research and teaching in Oaxaca, Mexico. He earned his B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard University, and his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University.
Jeffrey Stopple
associate vice chancellor for Undergraduate education
Jeffrey Stopple is Associate Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Education, and Professor of Mathematics. His specialty is Analytic Number Theory, which uses calculus and complex numbers to study the distribution of the primes. Stopple received his PhD from UC San Diego in 1986, and, following postdoctoral positions at Stanford University and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, has been at UC Santa Barbara since 1987. He was a Fulbright Scholar at Charles University, Prague in 1997, and is the author of "A Primer of Analytic Number Theory" (Cambridge University Press, 2003). He has been chair of the Mathematics Department and of Undergraduate Council, and was Associate Dean for the UC Education Abroad Program.