About

Catherine Emihovich, Ph.D., Professor and Dean
University of Florida College of Education

Catherine Emihovich has been dean of the College of Education at the University of Florida since 2002. She is the college's 12th dean and the first woman to lead the college.

A hallmark of her deanship is the infusion of "engaged scholarship" as a core principle of a faculty-led transformation of the college's teaching and research programs. Engaged scholarship involves innovative research and educational activities, often carried out with community partners, which contribute directly to improved teaching and learning or address important social issues.

Emihovich has been actively involved in school-university partnership work since 1994, while a member of the counseling and education psychology faculty at State University of New York at Buffalo. SUNY-Buffalo was an institutional member of the Holmes Partnership, a consortium of local and national education interests dedicated to equitable education and reform in teaching and learning. Emihovich was elected president of the Holmes Partnership in 2008.

At UF, Emihovich also is a co-director of the University of Florida's Science for Life initiative, an interdisciplinary, nine-college program in the life sciences supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

She previously was dean of education for two years at California State University at Sacramento. She also was director of the Buffalo Research Institute for Education on Teaching and has served as professor at both Florida State University and the University of South Carolina.

Emihovich has a doctorate in educational psychology and a master's in measurement and statistics, both from SUNY-Buffalo. Her major research interests include children's language use, literacy issues, and race, class and gender equity issues. She has published three books and numerous scholarly articles and has presented over 100 papers at conferences worldwide. She is a past president of the Council on Anthropology and Education within the American Anthropological Association, and a past editor of Anthropology and Education.