Overview
As the leader of the largest and most academically diverse college at Cornell, Peter is responsible for an institution with 520 professorial faculty, 400 academic professionals and staff, 4600 undergraduates and 1300 graduate students. The College offers 40 undergraduate majors and 35 graduate fields and boasts a network of over 65,000 alumni.
Before serving as dean, Peter was Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Loewen was also the Robert Vipond Distinguished Professor in Democracy in the Department of Political Science; director of the Policy, Elections and Representation Lab (PEARL); associate director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society; a senior fellow at Massey College; and a fellow with the Public Policy Forum, a Canadian think tank and registered charity.
Peter’s research and teaching research interests include the future of democratic societies and the politics of technological change. He is interested in how politicians can make better decisions, in how citizens can make better choices, and how governments can address the disruption of technology and harness its opportunities. He has also studied the political and social contexts and consequences of COVID-19.
Peter has been the co-editor of four books, most recently Women, Power, and Political Representation (University of Toronto Press, 2021). He has published his journal articles widely, including in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Medicine, Nature Human Behaviour and the American Political Science Review.
He received his bachelor’s degree in political science (with a minor in economics) in 2002 from Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, and his Ph.D. in political science in 2008 from the Université de Montréal. He held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of British Columbia and the University of California, San Diego.
Since joining the University of Toronto in 2010, he has held visiting positions at the Melbourne School of Government at the University of Melbourne, the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University, the Institute for Advanced Study at Tel Aviv University and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. He is a member of Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP).
His many awards include receiving the Dean’s Excellence Award on eight separate occasions from the University of Toronto, as well as their Dean’s Special Achievement Award, and receiving the CQ Press best paper award in legislative studies from the American Political Science Association.