About
David Brown joined Drexel University on September 1, 2022, as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and professor in the Department of Politics. After receiving his PhD in political science from UCLA, he was named the inaugural Kenneth Boulding Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado (CU) Boulder. Dean Brown’s first tenure track position was at Rice University. After five years at Rice, he returned to CU Boulder for the next 20 years. At CU Boulder, he served as chair of the Department of Political Science for six years and divisional dean of the Social Sciences for four years.
Dean Brown’s body of work centers on political institutions and their impact on economic development. His scholarship explores democracy and its effect on economic growth and well-being. He recently completed a textbook, “Introduction to Statistics in R: the Art & Practice of Data Analysis.” Other publications include articles on democracy and its significance on homicide rates, the labor supply, and the labor share of income.
Brown’s teaching includes comparative politics, the political economy of development, and statistics. In addition, he is a frequent guest lecturer on active learning pedagogies concentrated explicitly on ‘flipping’ the classroom. He has also served as co-chair of the Quality Teaching Initiative at the University of Colorado Boulder, designed to foster teaching excellence as a top priority of a research-intensive university and to define clear criteria to evaluate teaching quality.