Dr. Rebecca W. Doerge is the Provost at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  In this role, she is responsible for all academic portfolios at the Institute, and, in collaboration with the Vice President for Research, works to strengthen the research missions of the Institute. She also plays a significant role in fundraising and external relations.

Prior to joining Rensselaer, Dr. Doerge was the Glen de Vries Dean of the Mellon College of Science and a member of the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences’ Department of Statistics and Data Science and the Mellon College of Science’s Department of Biological Sciences. As dean, she launched a future of science initiative to bring together Carnegie Mellon’s strengths in automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data analytics with the foundational sciences. The initiative includes construction of the Richard King Mellon Hall of Sciences and the Carnegie Mellon University Cloud Lab, the first such lab at a university.

A native of upstate New York, as a first-generation student Doerge studied theoretical mathematics at the University of Utah. She obtained her Ph.D. in statistics from North Carolina State University, and she was a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University, studying biometry and plant breeding. 

She is an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association (2007) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) (2007), and a Fellow of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (2009). She has published two books and more than 120 scientific articles, and has mentored many students, including 25 doctoral students who have successfully defended their theses.