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UC Berkeley College of Letters and Science names Sabrina Agarwal interim dean
The anthropology professor will serve a one-year term while UC Berkeley conducts a search for a permanent dean.
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Malvika Choudhary - Sat, 13, Jun 2026
- 17:50 EDT
- 44
Sabrina C. Agarwal / UC Berkeley
Indian-origin professor Sabrina C. Agarwal was appointed interim dean of the Division of Undergraduate Studies in the College of Letters and Science at the University of California, Berkeley, effective July 1, 2026, through June 30, 2027.
The appointment was announced by chancellor Richard K. Lyons and executive vice chancellor and provost Benjamin E. Hermalin. The university plans to launch a search for a permanent dean in the fall, with an appointment expected in spring 2027 and a projected start date of July 1, 2027.
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Agarwal, a professor and chair of Berkeley's Department of Anthropology, joined the university in 2004 and has served as department chair for the past three years. She also served as special advisor to former chancellor Carol Christ on Native American repatriation and compliance with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) from 2022 to 2025 and chaired the university's NAGPRA Implementation Committee from 2020 to 2024.
In announcing the appointment, Lyons and Hermalin highlighted Agarwal's interdisciplinary scholarship and commitment to undergraduate education.
“As an interdisciplinary scholar whose work sits at the intersection of three L&S divisions, Professor Agarwal has a strong commitment to Berkeley's mission, and ensuring that students receive a broad, rigorous liberal arts and sciences education grounded in equity, inclusion, and a genuine sense of community and belonging in the College,” they said.
A biological anthropologist, Agarwal's research focuses on bioethics; age-, sex-, and gender-related changes in bone health; and the relationship between skeletal biology and issues of social identity, inequality, disability, and health. Her work has examined bone microstructure, bone mineral density, and skeletal development in archaeological populations in Britain, Italy, Turkey, and Japan.
She has also studied the long-term effects of growth, reproduction, and lactation on maternal skeletal health in both human and non-human primate populations. More recently, her research has focused on the ethics of skeletal biology and bioarchaeology, including the curation and repatriation of ancestral human remains.
Agarwal received Berkeley's Distinguished Teaching Award in 2020, the university's highest honor for teaching excellence, and the Graduate Division's Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentorship of Graduate Student Instructors in 2015.
She is the founder of the Western Bioarchaeology Group, co-founder and former co-chair of the Bioarchaeology Interest Group of the Society for American Archaeology, and a founding co-editor-in-chief of Bioarchaeology International. She currently serves on the editorial board of the Yearbook of Biological Anthropology.
Agarwal earned her bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in anthropology from the University of Toronto and conducted research through the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute of Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. Before joining Berkeley, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at McMaster University and later served as a visiting lecturer at the University of Toronto.
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