Joseph Steinmetz will be the new dean of Kansas University’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, KU announced today.

Steinmetz is executive associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University. He will start in the new position July 1.

“I’m delighted that Joseph Steinmetz has agreed to lead KU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and I’m very confident he will be an outstanding leader for the university,” Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor David Shulenburger said in a prepared statement. “Dr. Steinmetz generated a remarkable degree of enthusiasm among the KU faculty within the college. His colleagues at Indiana spoke with great admiration for his talents and vision.”

Steinmetz began his academic career at IU in 1987, when he joined the Department of Psychology as an assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor and tenured in 1991 and then promoted to full professor in 1995.

In 1999, IU recognized his research and teaching contributions by awarding him the Eleanor Cox Riggs Professorship in psychology. He also is a core faculty member of two interdisciplinary programs at IU, the cognitive science program and the program in neural science, and also a member of the University Honors Faculty.

From 1995 to 2005, Steinmetz served as chairman of IU’s Department of Psychology. During his last year as department leader, he served as senior adviser to the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences for long-range planning. In that role, he oversaw external reviews that the college conducted for key departments as part of their strategic planning processes and he conducted a study of the general organization of other universities’ arts and sciences colleges around the country with an eye toward assessing IU’s own organization.