Meet Provost Mangelsdorf

Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs

Sarah C. Mangelsdorf, the provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is the chief operating officer of the university and deputy to the chancellor in the overall academic leadership and administrative management of the university. The provost acts as the chief executive officer of the institution in the chancellor’s absence.

Primary responsibilities of the position include oversight of all academic program and budget planning involving 12 schools and colleges; faculty and staff development and personnel matters; oversight of the following divisions: student life, enrollment management; outreach and extension (Division of Continuing Studies), information technology, libraries, international affairs; as well as institutional research, Office of Quality Improvement, institutional accreditation and student learning assessment.

Major new initiatives of the Office of the Provost include the Educational Innovation (EI) Initiative, expanding course access including growth in Summer Term offerings, the campus Diversity Framework, and the new Libraries Facilities Master Plan.

Provost Sarah C. Mangelsdorf

Mangelsdorf began serving as provost in August 2014 after six years as the dean of the Judd A. and Marjorie Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, where she was also a member of the Department of Psychology. Prior to Northwestern, Mangelsdorf served from 2004 to 2008 as the Henry E. Preble Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and was the first woman to hold that position. She joined the University of Illinois Department of Psychology in 1991 and served as associate provost from 2001–03 and head of the psychology department from 2003 to 2004. She previously served four years as an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan.

Mangelsdorf’s scholarship focuses on social and emotional development in infancy and early childhood, and she is the author of numerous articles in developmental psychology. At the University of Illinois, she was honored several times for her teaching. She won the Mabel Hohenboken Teaching Award in 1997 and the William Prokasy Teaching Award in 1998, the college’s highest award for teaching.

She has served on the editorial boards of five academic journals, including the editorial boards of “Child Development” and “Infant Behavior and Development,” and is a fellow at the American Psychological Association. She chaired the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) Arts & Sciences Deans Group and serves as a trustee of the Erikson Institute in Chicago.

Mangelsdorf earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1980 from Oberlin College in Ohio and her doctorate in 1988 in child psychology from the University of Minnesota. In 2012, she received the Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award from the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota.