Albert Bowker, Professor Emeritus and former Chancellor at the University of California-Berkeley, was the School's founding dean. He has a long history of public service as Chancellor of the City University of New York, and Dean of the Graduate Division of Stanford University. He was also the first Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education in the newly formed Department of Education. He was the founding Chairman of the Statistics Department at Stanford and has been President of both the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the American Statistical Association. “It was a challenge to be asked to organize a School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland . One of my first tasks was securing the faculty. I believe we were most successful.”?Bowker 1988

George Eads is Vice President of the Washington, D.C. office of Charles River Associates, an economics, finance, and business consulting firm. He was the School's second dean. An internationally known economist and senior-level business executive, Dr. Eads has been involved in air transportation for more than 30 years. His work addresses the transportation industry, including proprietary studies of the profitability of container shipping and of the long-run prospects for freight railroads. Prior to joining CRA in 1995, Dr. Eads was a Vice President of General Motors Corporation, and has held full-time faculty appointments at Harvard University, Princeton University, and the George Washington University. Question: “Why would anyone agree to become a dean? Answer: “Here at the University of Maryland we have a truly unique opportunity to design a program that will help this state, this region, and this nation build more professional governments.” ?Eads 1984

Michael Nacht, Aaron Wildavsky Dean and Professor of Public Policy at the Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California-Berkeley, was the Schools third dean. He served as Assistant Director for Strategic and Eurasian Affairs of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency during the first Clinton Administration. He served previously for more than a decade at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. He was the founding co-editor of the quarterly journal International Security. He is listed in Who's Who in America, 2002. “As dean of the School, I have a chance to practice what I think I ought to preach. My job, as I see it, is to create the conditions at the School which will nurture excellence in public policy education and research.” —Nacht 1988

Susan C. Schwab, U.S. Trade Representative, became Dean of the School of Public Policy in 1995, leaving in 2003 to accept the position of President and CEO of the University System of Maryland Foundation and USM Vice Chancellor for Advancement. Before joining the school, she served as Director of Corporate Business Development at Motorola, Inc. Prior to that appointment she was Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Director-General of the U.S. & Foreign Commercial Service during the Bush Administration. Schwab spent most of the 1980s as a trade policy specialist and legislative director for Senator John Danforth (R-Mo.), playing a major role in numerous U.S. trade policy initiatives, including landmark trade legislation that Congress enacted in 1984 and 1988. Schwab also served in the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo and in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative in Washington. "We know that the vast majority of our graduates will have to think, work and will often move across sectors during the course of their careers. Our job as scholars and scholar-practitioners is to prepare our graduates for public service in a multi-faceted policy environment.”—Schwab 1998

Steve Fetter has been a professor at the School of Public Policy since 1988. His research interests include arms control and nonproliferation, nuclear energy and releases of radiation, and climate change and carbon-free energy supply. He has been an advisor to many government agencies, NGOs, and scientific organizations, and has held visiting positions at Stanford, Harvard, and MIT. He holds a Ph.D. in energy and resources from the University of California, Berkeley, and an S.B. in physics from MIT. "The School of Public Policy is marking its 25th Anniversary. In that short time, we have emerged as one of the most innovative policy schools in the nation." —Fetter 2005