Tom Halverson

As Dean of the Faculty, Tom leads the faculty and academic departments in personnel and academic issues. He is responsible for the oversight of matters related to the hiring, development, and evaluation of tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty; the appointment, development, and support of academic Department Chairs; external reviews of departments; and the curriculum’s alignment with Macalester’s mission. He is a member of the President’s Senior Leadership Team and sits on the Faculty Personnel Committee (FPC), the Educational Policy and Governance Committee (EPAG), and the Faculty Advisory Council (FAC).

Tom joined the Macalester faculty in 1993 as a member of the Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science Department, and he holds the Armstrong Endowed Chair in Mathematics. He teaches calculus, linear algebra, computational linear algebra, algebraic structures, representation theory, and topology. His research is in algebraic combinatorics, focusing on matrix representations of groups and algebras, where he uses combinatorics to answer questions about algebraic structures and algebra to answer questions in combinatorics.

Tom earned his BA from Saint Olaf College (1986) and an MA and PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1993), where his doctoral advisor was Georgia Benkart. See this recent article, Gems from the Work of Georgia Benkart, in the Notices of the AMS coauthored with Arun Ram. Tom has spent sabbaticals at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, 1999) and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (Berkeley, 2008).