Vice President for Community Engagement and Stark Family Executive Director, Howard R. Swearer Center for Public Service

Mary Jo Callan serves as the vice president for community engagement for Brown University and executive director of the Swearer Center for Public Service. In this dual role, she leads efforts to deepen mutuality in Brown’s community-engaged teaching, learning, and research, with a particular focus on growing positive place-based engagement with communities throughout Providence and Rhode Island.

Prior to her roles at Brown and the University of Michigan, Callan served in K-12 schools, local government, and youth-serving nonprofits, where she experienced the promise and peril of engaging with academic institutions. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Michigan and her doctorate at the College of William and Mary. Her scholarly work and practice has focused on partnerships between universities and social and public sector organizations, with a particular emphasis on equity and reciprocity in these partnerships.

Interim Vice President for Campus Life, Executive Vice President for Planning and Policy

Russell Carey is the executive vice president for planning and policy at Brown University. Carey serves as the senior officer responsible for coordinating Brown’s strategic planning processes and providing leadership on a broad range of University strategy, policy, and governance matters. His major responsibilities include establishing measures to assess planning priorities and progress towards Brown’s strategic planning goals; conducting ongoing data gathering, analysis, and outcome assessment to evaluate the effectiveness of the University’s plans, initiatives, and policies; and assisting senior officers, divisions, and departments in defining strategies and developing plans to ensure continued growth and prosperity. He works closely with other senior officers and oversees the University’s plans and initiatives in the area of city and state economic development. He represents Brown on the board of directors of the Providence Foundation, the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce, and Crossroads Rhode Island.

Carey is a 1991 graduate of Brown and received his juris doctor from Suffolk University in 1995.

Director, Career & Life Design | Alumni Relations 

Dean of Medicine and Biological Sciences and Senior Vice President for Health Affairs

Dr. Mukesh K. Jain began his tenure as the eighth dean of medicine and biological sciences at Brown in March 2022. He is also the Frank L. Day Professor of Biology and Senior Vice President of Health Affairs.

Dean Jain came to Brown from Case Western Reserve University, where he was vice dean for medical sciences and Harrington Endowed Scientific Director of the Harrington Discovery Institute, and chief academic officer at University Hospitals health system in Cleveland. A physician-scientist, Dean Jain is internationally recognized for his work discovering a central role for Kruppel-like factors, a family of DNA transcription factors, in cardiovascular biology, innate immunity, and metabolism. His clinical and academic contributions have been recognized through numerous honors including election to the National Academy of Medicine, the American Society for Clinical Investigation (where he was a past president), the Association of American Physicians, and the Association of University Cardiologists.

Dean Jain is a passionate advocate for the development of physician-scientists, and is a co-founder of the Physician-Scientist Support Foundation. This nonprofit organization strives to build a sustainable and diverse physician-scientist workforce through financial and research support for fundamental discoveries that improve human health.

Sidney A. Fox and Dorothea Doctors Fox Professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Science, Associate Professor of Neurology, Associate Director of the Brown Center for Translational Neuroscience

Dr. Judy Liu studies pediatric epilepsy as a clinical and laboratory-based researcher.  She has worked on both rare and common forms of the disorder focusing on how gene expression changes cause circuit changes leading to epilepsy. Her lab has been funded by the Epilepsy Foundation, CURE Epilepsy, and the National Institutes of Health.

She was an undergraduate at Yale University where she majored in molecular biology, biochemistry, and biophysics. She earned an M.D./ Ph.D. at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and did her residency in neurology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a Harvard Medical School affiliate, where she was chief resident. After post-doctoral studies, she joined the faculty at George Washington University. In 2018, she moved to Brown University where she is associate professor and associate director for the Center for Translational Neuroscience.

Associate Director of Regional and Generational Programs | Alumni Relations

Brown University President

Christina Hull Paxson has served as Brown University’s 19th president and professor of economics and public policy since July 1, 2012. 

Under Paxson’s leadership, Brown has fortified its standing as a leading research university known for its excellence and innovation in undergraduate education, its transformational vision in fueling economic development through community and government partnerships, and its commitment to inclusion and access.

Paxson’s ambitious strategic plan for Brown establishes the University at the forefront of higher education in all these areas. She has led the creation and growth of centers and institutes that connect top researchers and scholars to confront critical 21st-century issues in areas spanning neuroscience, environmental and climate studies, economics, international and public policy, humanistic studies, and translating science and technology to find treatments and cures for disease. At the same time, Brown continues to lead in undergraduate education, with the University among the top producers of Fulbright winners each year.

Paxson is a passionate advocate on issues of access to higher education, and Brown has gained international attention for its campus-wide effort to develop and implement its comprehensive Pathways to Diversity and Inclusion action plan, which the University launched in 2016. In addition, Brown became a national model in working with its students to create one of the first student centers for undocumented, low-income, and first-generation college students. 

Prior to her appointment at Brown, Paxson was dean of the Princeton School of International and Public Affairs and the Hughes Rogers Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. 

Paxson is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Swarthmore College, and earned her Ph.D. in economics at Columbia University.

Assistant Director of Alumni Belonging | Alumni Relations

Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo Director and Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library, Professor of History

Karin Wulf is the Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo Director and Librarian at the John Carter Brown Library and professor of history at Brown University. Before coming to Brown, she was the executive director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture and professor of history at William & Mary. Karin earned her Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University. A historian of what she has described as “Vast Early America,” she writes for public and academic audiences about early American history, the worlds of scholarship and scholarly publishing, archives, and special collections. The author or editor of prize-winning scholarship on gender, family, and politics, her book “Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America” will be published by Oxford University Press in the summer of 2025; Karin’s next book projects include “Genealogy: a Very Short Introduction,” “Inventing Early America,” and “1776 Across the Americas,” based on an exhibit that will be mounted at the JCB Library for 2026. She has served on a variety of boards, including by appointment of Governor Ralph Northam, the Virginia 250 commission; she was the academic co-director for the Georgian Papers Programme and is a co-founder of Women Also Know History. She was appointed to Rhode Island’s commission on archives, and is a current board member for the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, the National Humanities Alliance, and Johns Hopkins University Press.