Kathryn Leonard serves as Occidental's vice president for academic affairs and interim dean of the college. Most recently, she served as Associate Dean for Curricular Affairs at Occidental from 2022-24, and she was the founding chair of the Department of Computer Science. She joined Â鶹ƵµÀfaculty after helping to build a university at California State University, Channel Islands, where she was a faculty member in the mathematics department for more than a decade. She earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics and English from University of New Mexico before completing a PhD in Mathematics at Brown University. She held postdoctoral positions at California Institute of Technology and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley. She served as the President of the Association for Women in Mathematics from 2021-23 and is co-founding Editor-in-Chief of the research journal La Matematica. Her research interests center on mathematical modeling for computer vision, computer graphics, and data science applications with an emphasis on explainable AI.