CSM Dean Happy to Back in Boston

By Lissa Harris of The University Reporter, September 2007

The newly appointed dean of the College of Science and Mathematics hasn't really unpacked yet/ The shelves in his office, on the second floor of Wheatley, are still pretty bare, apart from a few stray books and papers. But Andrew Grosovsky (UCR)--fresh from a highly successful three-year term as vice provost for undergraduate studies at the University of California, Riverside--is already armed with ideas for how to make the college a better place for learning and teaching.

"you can't just take something developed somewhere else and just put it over here, without respecting the culture of this university. But there are many things I'd like to try," he says.

Grosovsky's reputation as a passionate advocate for success precedes him. Under his leadership, has developed several innovative methods of increasing student retention and performance in the classroom.

One of the most promising initiatives he worked on at UCR, Grosovsky says, was a change in the way the tutoring program ran. Before, students who needed help in their classes had to report to a central tutoring office. That wasn't working, said Grosovsky--students just weren't asking for the help they needed. Instead, the university began working with the faculty to figure out the classes in which students were struggling the most, and then hired student leaders to attend those classes and work closely with the professors to get help to the students who needed it.

"That made a big impact on retention and grades," he says.

Another project developed at UCR under Grosovsky's watch was a new undergraduate research conference and journal, which just put out its inaugural issue this past spring. Grosovsky, who has made a point of getting students involved in his own research, hopes to get a similar journal started at UMass Boston.

"Undergraduates need to get involved in things that go beyond the classroom. There's no replacement for that," he says.

One of his major goals as dean of the college, Grosovsky says, is to keep looking for ways to help every student at the university, from enrollment through graduation. Grosovsky says he's also advocate  of what he calls "the relationship between success and diversity."

"You come to the university, and one of the things you want to be exposed to is a much broader world of things. You want to be in a community where people have very different backgrounds," he says. "That contributes to this sense of growth beyond yourself." Grosovsky, who got his bachelor's degree from Boston University and his PhD from Harvard, is glad to becoming back to Boston after a long stretch on the West Coast.

"Culturally, its location, its history, its sense of place--it's an exciting place to be and I missed that," he says. "Massachusetts and Boston need UMass Boston to reach its potential. You must have, more now than ever, a public research university that provides access to qualified students of all backgrounds."

As if that weren't enough of a challenge, Grosovsky is also a working scientist, and will be continuing his work on mutagenesis and genetic instability in human cells at UMass Boston. As soon as he moves into his lab, this is.

"I've barely moved into my house," he says.