From: Cheryl Regehr, Vice-President and Provost
Date: May 31, 2023
Re: Appointment of Professor Javed Mostafa as Dean, Faculty of Information (PDAD&C #39)

I am delighted to announce that the Agenda Committee of Academic Board has approved the appointment of Professor Javed Mostafa as Dean of the Faculty of Information (iSchool) for a five-year term from September 1, 2023 to August 31, 2028. Professor Mostafa will also be joining the Faculty at the rank of Professor.  

Professor Mostafa completed his PhD in information science from the University of Texas at Austin in 1994, with a focus on developing information query models and search interfaces for video information.   He received tenure and promotion in 2000 at Indiana University-Bloomington, and served there as the Victor H. Yngve Associate Professor before joining the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2007.  Professor Mostafa was twice named as the Frances McColl Distinguished Term Professor, and currently he is jointly appointed at the iSchool (School of Information and Library Science) and the Biomedical Research Imaging Center (School of Medicine) at UNC.   

In the last 30 years as an academic, Professor Mostafa served as an Associate Dean of Research, an Associate Dean of Academics, and the leader of an interdisciplinary informatics training program called the Carolina Health Informatics Program (CHIP).  Launching and establishing CHIP required collaboration among seven UNC academic units that became its founding partners, including the School of Medicine, the School of Nursing, the College of Arts and Sciences (Computer Science) and the iSchool. The CHIP program is a degree-granting organization which also acts as an interdisciplinary research hub.  As the founding Professor and Director, Professor Mostafa led the development of three graduate certificate programs, a master’s degree, a PhD and postdoctoral training curricula for CHIP.   

Professor Mostafa has more than 105 peer-reviewed publications to his credit, covering a wide variety of topics in the broad area of information retrieval.  Professor Mostafa was the Editor-in-Chief of a major journal in his field called the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology and an Associate Editor for the flagship journal in the area of information retrieval called the ACM Transactions on Information Systems.  He currently serves as an Associate Editor for the ACM Transactions on Internet Technology.  

Professor Mostafa received numerous grants from for-profit and non-profit organizations, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) – achieving continuous grant funding for the last two decades based on support from the latter two major research organizations. Currently, Professor Mostafa directs a research laboratory and a training program with about 25 research faculty, staff and students and has active projects that focus on developing novel applications of machine learning, data visualization, and equitable information services.  

Professor Mostafa is passionate about diversity and access to higher education. As the Director of CHIP, Professor Mostafa led the creation of summer programs to expand participation of students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBUCs), online programs to support engagement of non-traditional students, and high-school pipeline programs to expose biomedical informatics to early learners.  Another facet of Professor Mostafa’s interest is innovation and development of translatable technologies. In the last decade he co-founded two companies, namely KeonaHealth (keonahealth.com) and Cymantix (cymantix.com).  Both of the latter companies received multiple stages of government and private-sector investments and they currently operate in the USA. 

I am grateful to the Advisory Committee for their contributions over the course of this search, and to Professor Wendy Duff, who has agreed to continue as Dean until August 31, 2023, to support the decanal transition. Professor Mostafa’s academic leadership experience, research excellence, and vision for the future of the field will be key to the success of the Faculty of Information in the years ahead. Please join me welcoming Professor Mostafa to the University of Toronto.