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John Colombo

The University of Kansas’ largest academic unit will have a new interim leader beginning this summer.

Carl Lejuez, KU’s interim provost, announced the appointment of John Colombo as interim dean in a memo to the campus community on Thursday. Colombo currently serves as a psychology professor, the interim vice chancellor for research and the director of the KU Life Span Institute.

Colombo will take over the position on July 1. He will replace Clarence Lang, who has been serving as interim dean since April 2018 but who is leaving the university after the spring semester to become the liberal arts dean for Pennsylvania State University.

“John is a proven leader and is skilled at stepping up during times of transition,” Lejuez said in the announcement. “During his 37 years at KU he has built a distinguished career and has developed environments that support the success of our students, staff and faculty.”

Colombo first came to KU in 1982 to work for the university’s Bureau of Child Research, which is now known as the Life Span Institute, according to his faculty profile on the KU website. He later joined the CLAS faculty in 1988 and then the Department of Psychology in 2002.

He was appointed as the director of the Life Span Institute in 2007 and he also currently serves as the the director and principal investigator of the university’s Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center.

Prior to joining KU, Colombo received his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in psychology from State University of New York at Buffalo, and he worked at Youngstown State University in Ohio for one year. During his career, his research has focused on the developmental cognitive neuroscience of attention and learning.