Jean R. S. Blair became the Vice Dean at the United States Military Academy (USMA) in September of 2010. Prior to becoming the Vice Dean, she served as the director of the Computer Science Program for six years and as the director of the Information Systems Engineering program for four years. She spent academic years 2001-2002 and 2009-2010 on sabbatical at the University in Bergen, Norway, where she served as a visiting professor and senior research scientist. She became a Professor of Computer Science at West Point in 2001. Before joining the USMA faculty in 1994, Blair spent eight years on the faculty at the University of Tennessee and also worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a research scientist.

Blair earned the Ph.D. and M.S. degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and two B.S. degrees from Allegheny College, one in Economics and the other in Computer Science. Her research focuses on the design and analysis of algorithms for combinatorial problems, with recent emphasis on graph algorithms, self-stabilizing algorithms and algorithmic issues related to Network Science. She is author of numerous academic articles and has received research grants and awards from various agencies including the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Labs.

Blair has served as a commissioner and team chair for the Computing Accreditation Commission of ABET and continues to serve there as both a Computer Science program evaluator and an Information Technology program evaluator. She has been active in local and regional leadership of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and was a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Computing and Information and a guest editor for Discrete Mathematics.

Dr. Blair is a senior member of the IEEE, a senior member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and a member of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). She is a member of the international honor society for the computing and information disciplines – Upsilon Pi Epsilon, the international honor society in social sciences – Pi Gamma Mu, and was an Alden Scholar at Allegheny College. She received faculty member of the year award at the University of Tennessee and a teaching award at the University of Pittsburgh.

Professional Experience