Thomas A. Finholt
Acting Dean of the School of Information 2013; Interim Dean 2015-16
Dean of the School of Information 2016-22
Thomas A. Finholt has the distinction of having served as acting dean (2013) and interim dean of the School of Information (2015-16) before being appointed dean in April 2016 after a national search. He served as dean until August 2022, when he became U-M’s vice provost for academic and budgetary affairs. He now serves as senior vice provost for academic and budgetary affairs and remains a professor of information at UMSI.
Finholt holds a PhD in social and decision science from Carnegie Mellon University and a BA in history from Swarthmore College. Prior to completing his PhD, he held a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
He joined U-M in 1991 as an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology. From 1997 to the present, his faculty appointments from assistant research scientist to professor have been at UMSI.
In addition to his teaching and research, he has held several administrative appointments at UMSI, including associate dean for research and innovation (2006-10), senior associate dean for faculty (2010-12) and senior associate dean for academic affairs (2012-15). His priorities as dean included expanding the number of online courses and degrees offered by UMSI, diversifying the pipeline for information technology employment, launching the effort to build the Leinweber Computer Science and Information Building, and applying research to increase civic engagement and improve the quality of online public discourse.
In 2019, UMSI launched its first fully online graduate degree, the Master of Applied Data Science, which quickly became one of the school’s largest programs. Other programs introduced during his deanship include the graduate certificate in extended reality and a professional certificate in public library management, offered online.
Finholt’s current research and teaching focus on sports analytics, or the application of data science to understanding athletic and team performance. He originated a curriculum in sports analytics at U-M in 2018 through a course that paired students from across campus with U-M teams to help understand athletes’ health, safety and performance using data gathered from wearable devices.
Finholt was a co-founder and then director of the Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work. Starting in the mid-1990s and continuing for 20 years, CREW pioneered the study of human-computer interaction in organizational settings, including research on many applications that are now commonplace, such as video conferencing and shared document editing.
He was a co-developer of the world's first operational virtual observatory, the Upper Atmospheric Research Collaboratory, which was a finalist in the science category for the 1998 Smithsonian/Computerworld awards. He also helped develop several other key systems for scientific discovery over the internet, including the Space Physics and Aeronomy Research Collaboratory and the George E. Brown Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation.
His professional affiliations have included the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association for Psychological Science.