Richard L. Edwards

Professional Bio:

Richard L. Edwards, is a well-known scholar, educator and administrator in social work education and professional practice.  On August 1, 2005, he assumed the position of dean of the School of Social Work at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.  On July 1, 2011 he was appointed as the interim vice president for academic affairs.

In a career spanning 40 years, Edwards has held deanships at Case Western Reserve University’s Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences and the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he served as Interim Provost and where he most recently had been Alumni Distinguished Professor of Social Work. He is a past president of the National Association of Social Workers.  He has written extensively and consulted widely on issues related to social work education and nonprofit and public management.

As an administrator, Edwards has been an effective advocate and innovative leader for his institutions. Under his leadership at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1992 to 2000, new doctoral and certificate programs were developed at the School of Social Work, while external funding for research, training and technical assistance increased dramatically. Under his leadership at Rutgers over the past four years, Edwards led the development of a new Institute for Families and four new academic centers.

As a scholar, Edwards has studied the management and organizational effectiveness of public-sector and nonprofit organizations. He has been a visiting professor at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada, and served as a consultant for the Soros Foundation’s Open Society Institute on the development of gerontology education for professionals in 18 central and eastern European countries. In 2008, Edwards spent several weeks at Ben Gurion University in Israel as a Fulbright Senior Specialist.