Donal B. O'Shea

Dean of Faculty and Vice President for Academic Affairs; Elizabeth T. Kennan Professor of Mathematics and Statistics

Specialization: Singularity theory; algebraic and differential geometry; mathematical physics and biology

Donal O'Shea is a well-known geometer, internationally recognized for his work in singularity theory and in computational algebraic geometry. O'Shea became dean in 1998 after serving on the faculty since 1980.

O'Shea's research deals with the interplay between the geometric, algebraic, and topological properties of singularities of higher dimensional spaces. "One of the things I like about the research," says O'Shea, "is that it takes methods from many pieces of mathematics and also has just some lovely open problems and many, many mysteries."

As dean, O'Shea's philosophy is to foster an environment in which faculty members can do their best work and drive the curriculum in new, intellectually vibrant directions. Says O'Shea, "I see my job as serving the faculty: clearing out obstacles, helping to hire and retain the best possible people, providing resources, aiding in identifying opportunities, fixing things that are broken, seeing that institutional work and resources are equitably shared, and otherwise getting out of the way."

A native of Canada, O'Shea is author of numerous books, monographs, and articles. From 1994 through 1997, he served as the College's officer of sponsored research. Since coming to Mount Holyoke, he has spent a year each in France and Germany and two at the University of Hawaii conducting research on singular points of real and complex hypersurfaces. He is especially interested in improving the teaching of geometry at the college level, as well as making the study of mathematics in general more accessible to students of differing abilities and interests. His current research projects also include the singular behavior of real analytic hypersurfaces; effective methods in local geometry; and the computational geometry and biophysics of cardiac abnormalities. He has translated over 130 Russian-language mathematics articles into English.

O'Shea has received numerous grants from the National Science Foundation and other funding organizations to support both his research and his curricular work. Most recently, he was co-principal investigator with H. Pollatsek, L. M. Hsu, and S. Rachootin on a National Science Foundation grant for institute-wide reform in science laboratories at Mount Holyoke. He has been senior staff and/or author on other grants to Mount Holyoke totaling more than $1.5 million from the Dana Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard.

News Links:

"Dean O'Shea's Book Reviewed," Chicago Tribune, March 23, 2007

"O'Shea Ponders Shape of Universe," Office of Communications, March 1, 2007

"O'Shea Writes on the Challenges Facing Math Education," Forbes, February 26, 2007

"Faculty Voices," News from the Campaign, Spring 2003