Meet the Graduate College Deans
Interim Dean William Radke, Ph.D.
Dr. William Radke has returned to UCO after retirement in 2013 to serve as the Interim Dean for the Jackson College of Graduate Studies.
Dr. Radke, served as Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs at the University of Central Oklahoma for eight years and as Assistant Dean of the former Office of Sponsored Research and Grants as well as Assistant Dean of the Jackson College of Graduate Studies and Research and as Associate Vice President of Academic Affairs.
He held a faculty appointment in the Department of Biology at UCO for 25 years. In addition to his administrative assignments, he spearheaded UCO’s transformative learning initiative, undergraduate research effort, distance education initiative and leadership initiatives and curriculum development and review.
While in his administrative role Dr. Radke continued an active research program in his area of expertise, avian biology. He has numerous refereed publications in the field of vertebrate biology and has authored a half dozen laboratory manuals. Other publications and presentations have included transformative learning, the Student Learning Progress Model and undergraduate research. Dr. Radke holds a B.S. in science education and an M.S. in biology from Minnesota State University and a Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Arizona.
When he retired in June 2013, he was honored by the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education as provost and professor emeritus. During retirement he served as UCO ombudsperson and president of the Emeritus Faculty Association. In 2015 he was employed by the State Department of Education as the Executive Director of the Oklahoma Standards Setting Committee charged with composing new English and Mathematics Standards for Oklahoma schools.
Associate Dean Matthew Hollrah, Ph.D.
Matt Hollrah is the Associate Dean of the Jackson College of Graduate Studies. He is also a tenured professor of English and former chairperson of the English Department.
Hollrah’s scholarly work is focused on English composition pedagogy and creative writing. His work has appeared in the minnesota review, READER, and the edited collection Authorship Contested: Cultural Challenges to the Authentic, Autonomous Author. He is also the author of two online composition textbooks published by Great River Learning entitled So What? and Now What? His poetry has been published in Parabola, Swansea Review, Soundings Review, This Land, and the anthology Ain’t Nobody That Can Sing Like Me: New Oklahoma Writing, among others. He also serves on the creative writing advisory panel for the Oklahoma Arts Institute.
Hollrah is a past recipient of the Neely Excellence in Teaching Award, Vanderford Teaching Award, and the College of Liberal Arts Award for Outstanding Teaching. He also served as director of first-year composition, co-chair of the Provost’s Gen Ed Action Team, a UCO HLC QI Institutional Learning Outcomes Framework Team Member, a UCO AAC&U Persistence & Completion Academy Team Member, co-chair of the Oklahoma Academic Standards Writing Committee for English Language Arts, and an English content expert for Complete College America. He also serves on the peer review board for InSight: A Journal of Scholarly Teaching.
He lives with his wife, Julie, and their two children, Sadie and Simon, in Edmond.