The Dean's List: Faith and Flourishing on your Four-Year Journey

The university is both bewildering and beautiful, and four years here can enrich your mind and prepare you for a meaningful life, but that won't happen by itself. First-Years are invited to the Study Center to enjoy a home-cooked meal as Dr. Chris Clemens shares wisdom for how to take advantage of what UNC has to offer, while staying centered in your Christian faith.

Dr. Chris Clemens: Dr. Chris Clemens is Senior Associate Dean for Research and Innovation in the College of Arts & Sciences.

As senior associate dean, Clemens drives strategic planning and provides guidance across the College’s academic divisions and research programs, fostering new models of innovation, new initiatives and new collaborations. One of his primary responsibilities is to help the College and the campus build an Innovation Framework that will help guide teams of researchers through the process of translating basic research into innovations with commercial or social impact.

A stellar astrophysicist with a B.S. in astrophysics from the University of Oklahoma and a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin, Clemens came to UNC in 1998 after completing a NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Fellowship at Iowa State University and a Sherman Fairchild Prize Postdoctoral Fellowship at Caltech. Before becoming senior associate dean for natural sciences, Clemens served as chair of the department of physics and astronomy at UNC for four years.