Scott Coltrane attended Yale University and the University of California, Santa Cruz and earned a PhD in Sociology from UCSC in 1988. He was a professor at the University of California, Riverside for 20 years where he won teaching awards and assumed multiple leadership roles.
From 2008 to 2013, Coltrane served as the Dean of University of Oregon’s largest academic unit, the College of Arts and Sciences. In 2013, he was appointed as UO’s Provost and Senior Vice President, serving as the chief academic officer of the university until 2017, with one year as interim UO President in 2014/15.
Coltrane is the author or co-author of four books and over 100 academic articles and chapters. He was one of the first social scientists to develop a research agenda focused on the role of fathers in families, borrowing insights from multiple disciplinary perspectives to interrogate how and why men become involved in parenting and assessing how different forms of fathering are related to various aspects of society. His contributions to scholarship on gender and families were recognized in his election as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, his membership on the Council on Contemporary Families, various roles in the American Sociological Association and the National Council on Family Relations, and through election as President of the Pacific Sociological Association.
When not traveling to beach or mountain campgrounds in “Sweet Home” (a small motorhome named after Scott’s mother, who drove her own RV and lived in Sweet Home Oregon), Scott and wife, Wendy Wheeler-Coltrane, enjoy living in Eugene and visiting their adult children, Colin and Shannon.
