Sarah Mangelsdorf began serving as provost in August 2014 after six years as the dean of the Judd A. and Marjorie Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, where she was also a member of the Department of Psychology. Prior to Northwestern, Mangelsdorf served from 2004-2008 as the Henry E. Preble Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and was the first woman to hold that position. She joined the University of Illinois Department of Psychology in 1991 and served as associate provost from 2001-03 and head of the psychology department from 2003-2004.

She previously served four years as an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. Mangelsdorf’s scholarship focuses on social and emotional development in infancy and early childhood, and she is the author of numerous articles in developmental psychology. At the University of Illinois, she was honored several times for her teaching. She won the Mabel Hohenboken Teaching Award in 1997 and the William Prokasy Teaching Award in 1998, the college’s highest award for teaching. She has served on the editorial boards of five academic journals, including the editorial boards of Child Development and Infant Behavior and Development, and is a fellow at the American Psychological Association. She chaired the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) Arts & Sciences Deans Group and serves as a trustee of the Erikson Institute in Chicago.

Mangelsdorf earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1980 from Oberlin College in Ohio and her doctorate in 1988 in child psychology from the University of Minnesota. In 2012, she received the Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award from the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota.