July 14, 2025

Dear Members of Our Campus Community,

I am pleased to announce the appointment of an Interim Dean for the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management. Professor Sarah Anderson has graciously agreed to serve as Interim Dean, effective September 1, 2025. I appreciate the broad consultation provided by our Executive Vice Chancellor, Chair of the Academic Senate, and faculty and administrative colleagues.

Professor Anderson served as Acting Dean of the Bren School in Fall Quarter 2024, and she has served as Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion since 2019. Previously Chair of the Bren School Faculty Executive Committee, she has been active on many campus committees. 

Professor Anderson joined our faculty in the Bren School in 2007, bringing expertise in political structures and dynamics that influence environmental policy. Her research interests include environmental politics, and how politics shapes policies, as well as public policy and statistical methods. She is an expert on congressional politics, and she previously was a legislative assistant in the U.S. Congress, where she also researched legislation to brief members of the House Subcommittee on National Parks and Public Lands. Professor Anderson recently published a book on Rejecting Compromise: Legislators’ Fear of Primary Voters, and has a large interdisciplinary project on how salient wildfires affect distribution of government resources. Her work has been published in such journals as Nature Climate Change, the American Journal of Political Science, and PNAS. 

In consultation with our campus community, a search advisory committee will be formed for our next Bren School Dean. 

Please join me in extending our sincere thanks and best wishes to Dean Gaines as he moves on to his next chapter. Please also join me in welcoming Professor Anderson and thanking her for taking on this important interim role to help our campus with the transition, in addition to all of her many other contributions to UC Santa Barbara.

Sincerely,

Henry T. Yang
Chancellor