Michael E. Young, Ph.D., Selected as Vice Provost and Dean of the Baylor University Graduate School

Contact: Lori Fogleman, 254-709-5959
Follow us: @BaylorUMedia on X and LinkedIn

Following a nationwide search, Baylor University Provost Nancy Brickhouse, Ph.D., announced today that Michael E. Young, Ph.D., professor of psychological sciences, graduate program director and former Graduate School Faculty Associate at Kansas State University, has been selected as Vice Provost and Dean of the Baylor University Graduate School. His appointment is effective Aug. 1, 2025.

As Vice Provost and Dean, Young will lead the Baylor Graduate School’s best-in-class experience for students at a preeminent Christian Research 1 university while providing strategic leadership and advancing the priorities in the Baylor in Deeds strategic plan, which includes providing holistic support for the University’s growing number of graduate students. He also will contribute to national conversations around graduate education and research and collaborate with Deans and the Office of Graduate Professional Education to enhance Baylor’s traditional (on-campus), online and hybrid professional programs.

“Dr. Young brings strong leadership experience to Baylor. His commitment to very high-quality research, his sophisticated approach to data, his integrity in decision-making, and his leadership experience will serve Baylor well as we continue to strengthen graduate education,” Brickhouse said. “He is, as well, a particularly strong fit with our Christian mission. I have no doubt Dr. Young will serve Baylor well.”

Young will succeed Larry Lyon, Ph.D., who will retire Aug. 1 after serving 27 years as Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School and 50 years overall on the Baylor faculty.

“Larry Lyon’s leadership has been visionary and transformational,” Brickhouse said. “He believed Baylor should be a Christian R1 university long before most others could even imagine it. His beliefs did not waver even during times of difficulty. He gathered allies and worked strategically to advance the number and quality of graduate programs at Baylor. Today, we are R1, and one in four students at Baylor is a graduate student.”

“I’m so thrilled to join Baylor University’s Graduate School,” Young said. “A hallmark of Baylor graduate education is the pursuit of excellence in our understanding of God’s creation in all its wonders and colors. I’m looking forward to working with the Graduate School staff as we build on the incredible legacy of Dean Lyon. The work continues – the higher education landscape evolves, and we must respond while staying true to Baylor’s mission.”

A graduate of the University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign, Young began his career as a computer scientist with a specialization in Artificial Intelligence working for the Army Corps of Engineers, Procter & Gamble and Hewlett-Packard. He returned to academia to earn his M.S. in computer science (AI) and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of Minnesota/Twin Cities. He rose through the academic ranks at Minnesota, University of Iowa and Southern Illinois University at Carbondale before joining Kansas State in 2012 as the Head of the Department of Psychological Sciences, a position he held until 2021.

In 2021-22, Young served as the Faculty Fellow in the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment, in 2022-24 as the Graduate School Faculty Associate and starting in 2023 as associate director of the Cognitive and Neurobiological Approaches to Plasticity Center (CNAP), a Center of Biomedical Research Excellence founded in 2017 through a $10.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. Since 2024, he has served as professor and graduate program director in psychological sciences.

During his time as head of psychological sciences at Kansas State, he and his faculty successfully pursued goals set out in the department’s 2025 Strategic Vision, including doubling their endowment, increasing research productivity by 82% and dramatically multiplying the department’s annual research expenditures.

As Graduate School Faculty Associate from 2022-2024, Young brought extensive data skills to update dashboards that supported the tracking of graduate student progress, program self-assessment and student recruitment. He performed multilevel analysis of graduate student data from these dashboards that supported decision-making, guided the development of Graduate School’s strategic plan and created a series of data reports and action plans. In addition, he updated and created policies and procedures for graduate faculty membership and new graduate programs and courses and led the implementation of a new Graduate School pilot of an innovative process for graduate program review. He also joined the university’s effort to update and revitalize accelerated (4+1) programs.

Over his academic career, Young’s research has been supported by more than $2.5 million in external grants. His primary research program involves the study of decision making in dynamic tasks. He is currently studying the situational and individual variables related to impulsive and risky choice in video game environments. He continues to integrate his background in computer science with his interest in psychology through the development of computational models of environment-behavior relations. Dr. Young's love of mathematics also is revealed by his occasional side project evaluating various statistical and design methods using Monte Carlo simulation.

In 2021, Young was elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. He has been honored twice by the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior with the Joe Brady Award as the author of the most frequently cited JEAB paper over a three-year period. In 2020, he received the Kansas State University Presidential Award for Outstanding Department Head. He has been actively involved in the Council of Graduate Departments of Psychology, serving on the Board of Directors in 2018 and as Chair of the Board from February 2020 to 2021, a particularly challenging year due to COVID.

Young has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals, contributed to book chapters, proceedings and other publications and presented at more than 160 academic conferences and meetings across the country. He serves on the editorial boards of Frontiers in Comparative Psychology and the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior and from 2021-2023, was co-editor of  a special issue of Perspectives on Behavior Science on “Advanced Quantitative Techniques for the Analysis of Large Data Sets.”

At Kansas State, Young is a member of the Presidential Committee on Integrity in Research and Scholarly Activity and the Department of Computer Science Computational Core Interdisciplinary Advisory Board. In 2023, he served on the K-State Next Gen Task Force for strategic planning: Accelerating Academic Innovation to Meet Student Needs.

Provost Brickhouse also thanked the search committee, who provided their time, insight and service to Baylor during this process: Dean Shanna Hagan-Burke (chair), Dr. Gary Carini, Dr. Paul Allison, Dr. Christine Limbers, Dr. Christopher M. Rios, Dr. Rebecca Thornton, Dr. Garritt J. Tucker, Dr. Andrea L. Turpin and Dr. M. Renée Umstattd Meyer.

ABOUT THE BAYLOR GRADUATE SCHOOL

The Graduate School is Baylor University’s central administrative office, serving over 5,000 students in more than 100 academic programs across the humanities, arts and sciences. The Graduate School oversees admissions and enrollment management for all graduate programs, provides professional development opportunities for students, recognizes outstanding graduate student research and teaching and confers over 1,000 graduate degrees each year. Graduate students play a key role in Baylor’s research and scholarship, producing approximately 800 professional presentations and over 600 research articles per year. Nearly 300 research doctorates are awarded each year. More than 95% of Baylor doctoral graduates work full-time in an array of academic, research and professional settings. 

ABOUT BAYLOR UNIVERSITY

Baylor University is a private Christian University and a nationally ranked Research 1 institution. The University provides a vibrant campus community for more than 20,000 students by blending interdisciplinary research with an international reputation for educational excellence and a faculty commitment to teaching and scholarship. Chartered in 1845 by the Republic of Texas through the efforts of Baptist pioneers, Baylor is the oldest continually operating University in Texas. Located in Waco, Baylor welcomes students from all 50 states and more than 100 countries to study a broad range of degrees among its 12 nationally recognized academic divisions. Learn more about Baylor University at www.baylor.edu.