The University of Virginia announced today that Malo A. Hutson has been appointed the dean of the School of Architecture, effective July 1.
Hutson is currently a tenured professor and director of the Urban Planning Ph.D. Program in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University in New York City, as well as director of the school’s Urban Community and Health Equity Lab. He is a nationally and internationally recognized expert in the areas of community development, environmental justice and urban health.
Hutson brings with him a proven track record of academic leadership, and his collaborations across disciplines in both the academic and professional sphere place him at the nexus of environmental, architectural and urban equity studies.
At Columbia, Hutson was a faculty member of both the Earth Institute and the Columbia Population Research Center, where he co-led the urbanism group. He also served as director of project development for Columbia World Projects, a university-wide initiative focused on mobilizing Columbia researchers to work on global challenges in concert with government, the private sector and community organizations. In this role, he helped build teams and develop a portfolio of projects in excess of $100 million with wide strategic scope and significant social impact, including several projects sited in Virginia.
Hutson’s research focuses on community development and urban equity, including the intersection of urban planning and racial, ethnic and health inequities and the interplay of the built environment and health. He is also the co-founder and a principal of a professional services consulting firm specializing in community-centered projects that improve the economic, environmental, political and social well-being of urban residents.
Prior to Columbia, Hutson held a tenured appointment as Chancellor’s Professor of City and Regional Planning in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the College of Environmental Design, University of California at Berkeley. He also chaired the Urban Studies program and served as the associate director of the Institute of Urban and Regional Development, overseeing significant research funding to foster collaborative research and scholarship across the Berkeley campus and globally.
Hutson received a Bachelor of Arts in sociology in 1997 and a Master of City Planning in Regional and Economic Development in 1999 from the University of California at Berkeley. In 2006, he received a Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Planning from the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, followed by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Scholar postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health.
Hutson will be joined in Charlottesville by his wife, Moira O’Neill, and their two children, Nia and Liam.