Two new deans joined USF this past summer, and a third will be joining them in January.

The new faces include Dr. Sten Vermund, Dean of the College of Public Health, Dean David Blackwell of Muma College of Business and Dean Elizabeth Spiller of the College of Arts and Sciences. These three colleges combined are home to over 29,000 undergraduate and graduate students.

They will serve as chief academic and administrative officers of their respective schools. They are there to support and lead their departments, budget, and be the face of their college.  

Dr. Sten Vermund, Dean of the College of Public Health 

Dr. Sten Vermund will be joining USF come January 2025, taking over from Donna Petersen after her 20 year tenure.

Vermund was born in Minnesota and grew up in Wisconsin and California. He shared that he loves sports, with his favorites being hiking, jogging, tennis and golf, as well as being a fan of music. 

“I’m also a big music fan, so I love to go to concerts. And for many years I’ve played [violin] myself,” Vermund said. 

He received his bachelor’s degree in human biology at Stanford University. Later on, Vermund said he wanted a “big adventure and to go to the big city” and went to Albert Einstein College of Medicine and later Columbia University for his doctoral work.  

Vermund came to USF after a five-year tenure as dean of Yale’s School of Public Health. There, he was able to increase its research portfolio, double the student body and set records for philanthropic support,  Vermund said. 

Vermund’s roles will include Senior Associate Vice President of USF Health, a professor and the President of the Global Virus Network since 2023. 

The Global Virus Network is a voluntary assembly with a goal to “help stem the burden of viral diseases globally,” Vermund said. Taking on the role as dean was easy, Vermund said, as the headquarters were recently moved to USF in 2024. 

 Vermund said he is excited to make similar contributions as he did at Yale.

“I feel comfortable in the research and the education in the public service spaces, and I think my background in medicine can be helpful,” Vermund said. 

He plans to take a very hands on approach, saying it will take “a lot of shoe leather… activities.” 

David Blackwell, Dean of Muma College of Business

A native to Alabama, David Blackwell said he grew up as an army brat, that he loves golf, dabbles with guitar and loves reading, especially non-fiction. 

Starting off as a political science and public administrations major at University of Tennessee, Knoxville later on switched and graduated with an economics degree.

“I took an economics course as part of public administration, and really got hooked on economics, so I switched majors into the business school,” Blackwell said.  

Blackwell has 24 years of experience in administration for higher education, including as dean at the University of Kentucky’s Gatton College of Business and Economics .

With his long history of administrative work Blackwell said that the experience will help him to “make decisions that are more informed, and to make those decisions more quickly.”

One of the main issues Blackwell said he wants to focus on as he begins his work as dean at USF is to address the high student to faculty and advisor ratio. By recruiting and retaining more faculty, he said he hopes this will help student progression as they will have more access to faculty and advising, Blackwell said. 

“I want to support students with their career aspirations and the skills they need to network and interview and build their resume so that they get a good placement after graduation,” Blackwell said. 

Wanting to take a hands-on approach as dean, Blackwell said he plans on holding town halls for staff during the semester, and to engage with student leaders in order to hear concerns from students.

“I am very proud to have been selected as dean, and thriller to be here,” Blackwell said. 

Dean Elizabeth Spiller, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences

Elizabeth Spiller is the new dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. She is originally from New England and enjoys to travel and live in different places.

“I do like to travel,” Spiller said. “ I like to meet different people in different places. I like living places more than I like traveling places.”

She graduated from Amherst College with a degree in English Literature. 

Spillers’ prior experience in administration and higher education begins at Florida State University (FSU) where she was the director of a cross-disciplinary program. She then became the Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at FSU. 

“I think of [my job] as an intellectual activity, not a paper moving around activity,” Spiller said.

Later, she became the dean of the College of Letters and Science at University of California Davis, and most recently, as chief academic officer at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. 

As she steps into her role as dean, Spiller emphasizes the transformative nature of going to a public university. Spiller said she is guided by the question “How are we changing the story?” when approaching her work and how the college impacts the lives of its students and the world around them. 

“Public universities can do things at scale that change the future,” Spiller said. 

For students, Spiller said that her highest priority is that she wants to ensure that teaching and research are “synergistic” at USF. 

She is going out to other departments and interacting with faculty and students, meeting Snowbird, the St. Pete campus dog and is planning on going to talks and community events moving forward. 

At the same time, her goal is to give faculty and department chairs the space to run their departments while facilitating conversations and bringing in her expertise and perspective to “help them move forward,”

“The job of the dean or any leader, is not to be the decider’” Spiller said. It’s to be the person who creates the structure within which decisions can happen.”