The Office of the Provost is responsible for retaining Pacific's high quality academic and research standards. The Provost is the Chief Academic Officer for the university. Our mission is to provide the highest quality academic and meaningful co-curricular experiences for Pacific students and to promote student, faculty and staff success.
Provost Gretchen Edwalds-Gilbert
Gretchen Edwalds-Gilbert is University of the Pacific's Provost. As chief academic officer, she oversees Pacific's nine schools and colleges on its three campuses in Sacramento, San Francisco and Stockton and has overall responsibility for Pacific’s academic programs, research and sponsored programs, accreditation, university libraries, institutional research, registrar, education abroad and academic international student services.
Before joining Pacific as Provost, Gretchen Edwalds-Gilbert served for six years as associate dean of the faculty at Scripps College, the No. 2 academic post at the all-women’s liberal arts college, one of the five Claremont Colleges in southern California. Scripps is ranked No. 33 by U.S. News and World Report among national liberal arts colleges.
Most recently she served for 15 months as acting vice president for academic affairs and dean of faculty, the college’s top academic post. She also has extensive experience working across all five of the Claremont schools, including serving as faculty director of the Claremont Faculty Leadership Program.
A molecular biologist who earned a Ph.D. from Weill Medical College of Cornell University/Sloan-Kettering Institute and a B.A. in biology from Swarthmore College, she is a biology professor on the faculties of Scripps, Pitzer and Claremont McKenna. She also is a visiting scientist at the Beckman Research Institute of the City of Hope and was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Warsaw Institute for Genetics and Biotechnology in Poland.
Before joining Scripps, Claremont McKenna and Pitzer as an assistant professor of biology in 2000, she was a post-doctoral research scientist at University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and an assistant professor at North Central College in Illinois.
Deans
Pacific's deans help shape the university's vision and provide strategic input into the connections between that vision and the allocation of university resources. Deans advocate for academic and educational quality and provide guidance regarding universitywide decisions affecting enrollment, academic and co-curricular programs and accreditation.
