Rutgers School of Communication and Information Names Mark Aakhus as Interim Dean
Mark Aakhus is an internationally renowned expert in the relationship between communication, argumentation and design in digital society
Rutgers University-New Brunswick officials have appointed Associate Dean for Research and Professor of Communication Mark Aakhus as interim dean of the School of Communication and Information (SC&I).
Aakhus succeeded Dafna Lemish, who served as interim dean from July 2022 to July 2025.
“The staff and faculty at SC&I are hard-working, dedicated people who hold themselves to the highest standards in educating our students and advancing knowledge about communication, information and media to make a just and desirable world for all,” Aakhus said. “It is an honor to be appointed to this role. I look forward to working together with my colleagues, especially in these challenging times, to achieve the mission of SC&I and Rutgers.”
“I am delighted that Mark was named as the next interim dean for the school, while the dean search is still open,” Lemish said. “Mark is a prominent scholar, innovative thinker, dedicated SC&I member, highly networked on campus and well-prepared for the role. With nine years as associate dean for research working closely with two different deans, he had intense preparation for the job.”
“Mark Aakhus brings to this role a deep understanding of the school’s mission, a collaborative leadership style and a longstanding commitment to advancing the fields of communication and information,” Rutgers-New Brunswick Chancellor Francine Conway said in an announcement to the SC&I community. “His leadership during this transitional period will help ensure continuity and momentum across SC&I’s teaching, research and service endeavors.”
Mark Aakhus brings to this role a deep understanding of the school’s mission, a collaborative leadership style and a longstanding commitment to advancing the fields of communication and information.
Francine Conway
Rutgers-New Brunswick Chancellor
Aakhus led the Chancellor-Provost Taskforce on Cyberinfrastructure and Data Science at Rutgers-New Brunswick, which helped launch the Rutgers Artificial Intelligence and Data Science (RAD) Collaboratory and the Cluster on Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, now part of the RAD Collaboratory. He also co-developed the Fair and Responsible Data Science initiative, a part of the Rutgers president's office diversity cluster hire initiative at Rutgers-New Brunswick. At SC&I, he has fostered the faculty’s development of several new working groups and labs dedicated to interdisciplinary research on communication, information, and media.
Aakhus’s research focuses on the conceptualization, conduct and consequences of technological and organizational interventions that seek to augment interaction and reasoning in decision-making and conflict-management.
The aim of his research, along with his teaching and engagement, is to improve understanding of the intentional and emergent design of institutions and infrastructures for communication and the co-creation of innovative and accountable democratic practice. This work is grounded in multiple methods of discourse analysis that incorporate computational social science and digital ethnography.
Aakhus recently co-authored Argumentation in Complex Communication: Managing Disagreement in a Polylogue. Published by Cambridge University Press, the book provides an account of argumentation in digital society that updates the 20th century revival of reasoning as communicative, situated practice while re-imagining a classical concern with many-to-many communication. Aakhus and his co-author Marcin Lewiñski received the 2023 Distinguished Book Award from the National Communication Association’s Philosophy of Communication Division.
Aakhus co-edited Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance, also published by Cambridge University Press, which anticipated social transformations afforded by mobile phones.
In addition, Aakhus has published extensively and edited multiple special issues and proceedings about how emerging technologies are entangled in the pragmatics of human communication.
