President Sian Leah Beilock today announced the appointment of Nina Pavcnik as inaugural dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, effective July 1—a significant step toward Dartmouth becoming the best undergraduate education within a world-class university.
Pavcnik, the Niehaus Family Professor in International Studies and a professor of economics, has served as interim dean since January 2025 and co-led the Future of Arts and Sciences project that proposed what officially became the School of Arts and Sciences on July 1, 2025. The dean is the chief academic, administrative, and budget officer for the newly established school.
“Nina Pavcnik has been visionary and tireless in her work to conceive and launch the School of Arts and Sciences,” President Beilock said. “Her leadership will strengthen how we teach, learn, and create knowledge—both inside and outside the classroom—that improves our world.”
Pavcnik (pronounced Pouch-nick) brings to the role a strong commitment to Dartmouth’s distinctive combination of liberal arts education and research excellence. She joined Dartmouth in 1999 after completing her PhD in economics at Princeton and BA at Yale. Growing up on the border of the former Yugoslavia in what is now Slovenia shaped her interest in how economic and political change affects ordinary people and communities.
At Dartmouth, Pavcnik found a unique intellectual environment that gave her the freedom to pursue those questions across fields and methods, combining international trade with questions of inequality, labor markets, education, and development.
“The search drew an extraordinarily strong group of candidates from across the country, and throughout the process, I was struck by the depth of engagement from faculty, staff, and students across Dartmouth,” said Lincoln Filene Professor in Human Relations Thalia Wheatley, who chaired the Search Advisory Committee.
“Those conversations made clear both the scale of the opportunity ahead and the kind of leadership this moment calls for: the ability to build a more integrated college, along with sound judgment, curiosity, humanity, and a deep commitment to our academic mission. We are fortunate to have found those qualities in our colleague and interim dean, Nina Pavcnik, and we have every confidence that she will continue to provide exceptional leadership for the Arts and Sciences.”
Over the course of her career, Pavcnik has become a leading scholar of how trade policy affects inequality and growth in lower-income countries. Her work helped shift the economics profession’s understanding of how globalization affects inequality, labor markets, families, and children and was among the first to provide rigorous empirical evidence on the distributional consequences of international trade, particularly for groups that had often received less attention in economics research.
Her research has informed policy discussions at institutions including the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and has been featured at major international policy forums such as the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium.
A recipient of Dartmouth’s Dean of Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentoring and Advising, Pavcnik has made mentoring and support of early-career scholars a central part of her professional service. At Dartmouth, she has supervised almost 500 students through a learning journey of completing an original research project, and several former students and research assistants have gone on to doctoral programs and academic careers.
She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in the United States and a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research in Europe and has served as editor or co-editor of several major journals, including the Journal of Economic Perspectives and the Journal of International Economics.
As a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, she traveled to colleges and universities across the country, engaging students in conversations about the value of liberal arts education, her research on opportunities and challenges of globalization, and critical inquiry.
“Dartmouth has shaped my understanding of what an institution can be at its best—intellectually serious, ethically grounded, and deeply human,” said Pavcnik. “I am honored to serve as the inaugural dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and to continue building an institution where scholarship and teaching reinforce one another, where students experience their education as coherent and purposeful, and where Dartmouth’s distinctive values are sustained for future generations.”
Under Pavcnik’s leadership, the School of Arts and Sciences has established its organizational and governance structures, unified its administrative operations, and completed its first unified budget submission for FY27. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences has been integrating the school’s leadership structure into core faculty governance processes.
Faculty across the school earned notable national recognitions this year, including elections to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Sciences, and awarding of the Cozzarelli Prize.
A new undergraduate advising pilot is underway, consolidating faculty advisors, deans, and academic support staff into a unified model, alongside the launch of Courses@Dartmouth to replace a legacy course registration system.
Three undergraduates this spring were named Truman Scholars, geared to public service, the most Dartmouth has had in a single year. Dartmouth has also had Goldwater, John Robert Lewis, and Churchill scholars this year, and recently ranked fifth nationally as a Fulbright Top Producing Institution.
This historic appointment is the most recent step in the multiyear project of conceiving and launching the School of Arts and Sciences, initiated by President Emeritus Philip J. Hanlon ’77 and led by former Provost David Kotz ’86, former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Elizabeth F. Smith, and Pavcnik.
In her message to the Dartmouth community on the appointment, Beilock thanked the members of the search committee for their support and guidance, as well as all the faculty and staff who have played a role in the implementation of the new school.