About me
Paul Sniegowski became the 21st president of Earlham College and Earlham School of Religion on August 5, 2024.
Prior to Earlham, Sniegowski served as the Stephen A. Levin Family Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and a professor of biology at the University of Pennsylvania.
As dean of the College since 2017, Sniegowski was responsible for the direction of Penn’s liberal arts undergraduate curricula, programs and students in academic departments and interdisciplinary programs across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Sniegowski worked closely with faculty and students in the College and across the University in adapting the College’s teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, establishing consultative faculty committees to plan for online teaching and steering the College’s return to in-person instruction after the pandemic. Under his leadership, the College launched new minors in Environmental Humanities and Data Science and has initiated a review of its longstanding General Education requirement.
Sniegowski has been an advocate for First-Generation, Low-Income (FGLI) students, participating in the establishment of the Penn First Plus Office and launching the FGLI DAB student advisory board in 2018 to provide a voice for FGLI students in the College and complement the ongoing work of DAB, the longstanding dean’s advisory board. In addition, he has played a key role in Penn’s five-year grant to support inclusive teaching in the sciences through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Inclusive Excellence 3 program, serving as Project Director in the first year of the grant.
Sniegowski’s scientific work focuses on evolutionary and population genetic theory as a framework for understanding genetic mutation rates and mutational phenomena. His research has been supported by the Sloan Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and NASA; he is a co-author on nearly 70 peer-reviewed papers, has mentored dozens of graduate, undergraduate, and high school students, and is an award-winning teacher. Throughout his career, Sniegowski has also maintained an active commitment to outreach and regularly engages with public audiences to promote better understanding of science. He is currently writing a book, Persistence of Error: A Natural History of Mutation, explaining genetic mutation for non-scientists.
An Indiana native, he received his bachelor’s in music from the Indiana University School of Music; an M.A. in biology from Indiana University, Bloomington; and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He joined Penn’s Department of Biology in 1997 after a postdoctoral fellowship at Michigan State University.
Paul and his spouse and partner, Gail Kienitz, are the parents of Ben Kienitz Sniegowski ’23. Their daughter, Emma Kienitz Sniegowski, is a 2018 graduate of Kenyon College. Paul and Gail — along with their Golden Retriever, Willa — live on campus in the President’s House.