Dean Strempel’s scholarly interests focus on the music of women composers, and her work includes numerous recordings, commissions, articles and edited volumes that examine the political, social and musical contexts of the most influential female composers of our time. As a trained opera singer, she has performed with the Bolshoi Opera, Wolf Trap Opera and Opera Theatre St. Louis, as well as with the Chautauqua, Skaneateles and Berkeley Early Music festivals, with roles including Violetta in La Traviata, Gilda in Rigoletto and the title role in Lucia di Lammermoor. She has been featured on eight recordings, including love lies bleeding: songs by Libby Larsen, prepared with the composer. A Presidential Scholar in the Arts, Strempel is a nationally recognized champion for transfer students and views superb public education as one of the principal social justice issues of our time.

Strempel and co-author Stephen J. Handel are celebrating the upcoming Rowman & Littlefield release of their third book together, focused on higher education public policy entitled: Beyond Free College: Making Higher Education Work for 21^st Century Students. This work is a follow up to their co-edited the two-volume set, “Transfer and Transformation: Fostering Transfer Student Success.”

Strempel served as the Senior Vice Provost for Academic Affairs at the University of Cincinnati prior to joining the team at UCLA. Previous to that, she served in a variety of roles at Syracuse University over a seventeen-year span, where she was awarded a Kauffman Foundation eProfessorship and an ACE Fellowship, which she served at Colgate University. Strempel received her Bachelor of Music from the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music and she received her doctorate from Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. An avid runner, she is the proud mother of two sons.

“The Herb Alpert School of Music weaves together UCLA’s celebrated scholarly brilliance and performance excellence. Its rich diversity mirrors that of the global reach of the city in which it is embedded. Both as a performer and as an entrepreneur, Herb Alpert has been instrumental in fostering this global reach, and it is an honor serve as the Inaugural Dean to the school that bears his name.”