Katherine S. Newman, a widely published expert on poverty and the working poor and an experienced academic administrator, joined Johns Hopkins in September 2010 as the James B. Knapp Dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.

Newman was previously the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes '41 Professor in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Department of Sociology at Princeton University, where she had taught since 2004. From 2007 until her departure from Princeton, she directed the university-wide Institute for International and Regional Studies. She founded and chaired the university's joint doctoral program in social policy, sociology, and politics and psychology.

Previously, during eight years at Harvard University, she was the first dean of social science at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. While there, she designed a university-wide research program in the social sciences, promoting collaboration among faculty from the arts and sciences, public health, medicine, law and education.

Newman also has served on the faculties of Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley.

Newman, who has written or co-authored nine books and has two more in progress, has focused much of her scholarly work on the lives of the working poor and mobility up and down the economic ladder. She also has investigated the impact of tax policy on the poor, the history of public opinion's impact on poverty policy, school violence, and the impact of globalization on young people in Italy, Spain, Japan and South Africa, among other issues.

Newman graduated from in 1975 from the University of California, San Diego, where she majored in sociology and philosophy. She earned a Ph.D. in anthropology in 1979 from the University of California, Berkeley.