William F. Tate IV
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
President

Year Elected

2016

Membership status

Regular
William F. Tate IV serves as the president of Rutgers University, where he holds the titles of Distinguished Professor and University Professor. Before his appointment at Rutgers, he served as the president of Louisiana State University. At LSU, he held faculty appointments in sociology (primary), psychiatry and behavioral medicine (clinical), epidemiology (secondary), and population and public health (secondary) at the Baton Rouge campus, LSU Health Sciences Center in Shreveport, LSU Health Sciences Center in New Orleans, and the Pennington Biomedical Research Center. Tate has served as Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost, while holding the Education Foundation Distinguished University Professorship in sociology and preventive medicine (secondary) at the University of South Carolina. Before that, he served as the Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor in Arts & Sciences and dean of the Graduate School and Vice Provost for Graduate Education at Washington University in St. Louis. Tate's research focuses on designing epidemiological and geospatial models to explain the social determinants of educational attainment, health, and developmental outcomes. He is particularly interested in models that enhance our understanding of mathematics and science attainment and served as a member of the Mathematical Sciences Education Board at the National Research Council. His research projects include examining the distal and social factors that predict STEM undergraduate and doctoral degree attainment, broadly defined to include highly quantitative social science disciplines (e.g., economics). His co-edited book, Beyond Stock Stories and Folktales: African Americans’ Paths to STEM Fields, captures the direction of this research program. His co-authored article, "A comparative financial analysis of Louisiana's land-grant universities: The Morrill Acts and Brown revisited," published in the William & Mary Law Review, underscores his commitment to advancing the emerging fields of legal and financial epidemiology. His edited book project, Research on Schools, Neighborhoods, and Communities: Toward Civic Responsibility, reflects his interest in community psychology and the geography of opportunity in metropolitan America. Tate is a fellow and past president of the American Educational Research Association. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.