2022 – Dean Geeta Anand

Geeta Anand is Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. In her two years as dean, she has set the school on a path to changing who gets to be a journalist in this world. She launched a $100 million fundraising initiative to remove the economic obstacles to people from historically marginalized groups becoming journalists. She led the development of an anti-racism plan that helped diversify the school’s instructors, among other things, and the school has completed or made substantial progress on 80 percent of these initiatives. She created new journalism classes to enable students to report with cultural sensitivity and historical context on China and other parts of the world. She brought campus leaders together to solve the world’s disinformation problem by analyzing bills before Congress and proposing legislative solutions, as well as creating a new journalism class that produces solutions-oriented stories about efforts to change the U.S. law that protects social media companies from being held liable for their  content.

Anand is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author whose stories on corporate corruption won the Wall Street Journal a Pulitzer Prize in 2002, and she was lead reporter in a series on healthcare that was a finalist in 2003. She wrote the non-fiction book, The Cure, about a dad’s fight to save his kids by starting a biotech company to make a medicine for their untreatable illness, which was made into the Harrison Ford movie Extraordinary Measures. She worked as a journalist for 27 years, most recently as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in India. She began teaching at Berkeley Journalism in 2018 and was appointed dean in 2020.