Carnegie Mellon Dietrich College of Humanities & Social Sciences

08/20/2026

Shine bright, ! ✨

08/18/2026

As we look ahead to the fall semester, we’re excited to welcome not only new undergraduate and graduate students, but also new faculty! This academic year, Carnegie Mellon University’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences is adding 25 new faculty members to the roster.
Meet our incoming faculty ⬇️

08/17/2026

A new platform from The Heisman Trophy in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Statistics & Data Science will allow college football fans to cast the first official vote of the Heisman season. Read more in this feature from ESPN ⬇️

08/17/2026

A season-long celebration of all players, shaping the road to the Heisman.

https://hopefuls.heisman.com

08/11/2026

Meet the nine doctoral students named to the 2026 cohort of Dietrich College Scholars! This fellowship program supports students through financial assistance, professional development opportunities and network-building experiences. It also fosters connections among incoming doctoral students.

08/07/2026

Sending our Dietrich College community into the weekend with a shoutout to our students who were named to the Spring 2026 Dean's List!

Congratulations to the students on the spring 2026 Dietrich College Dean's List!

07/28/2026

Can monkeys solve math problems? And if so, what does that say about the human brain and how we became the most advanced thinkers on Earth?

To investigate these and other evolutionary and neuroscience questions, Carnegie Mellon University and Rochester Institute of Technology researchers have created The Primate Portal — a touchscreen center that olive baboons at the Seneca Park Zoo can voluntarily interact with in exchange for nutritious snacks. Not only does play-time at the portal give the animals a way to focus their energy, which reduces conflict in the enclosure, but it provides scientists with an invaluable window into the primate mind. By probing the limits of the monkeys' abilities with matching games and geometric puzzles, the researchers are able to better understand the origins of human intelligence.

Best of all, the program also includes outreach with local schoolchildren who are taught to code and build games for the baboons. The students then get to take a field trip to the zoo to watch the monkeys play the games they coded — an experience shown to increase test scores and interest in STEM careers.

Read more about The Primate Portal ⬇

07/22/2026

Innovation happens through partnership. We are excited to join the U.S. Department of Energy Genesis Mission Awardee cohort and collaborate with fellow awardees advancing breakthrough research. Congratulations to Chad Schafer and Mikael Kuusela from the Department of Statistics & Data Science and their partners at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Together, they will develop AI tools to process huge amounts of data that could help us understand what makes up the universe and lead to advances in other fields, from climate science to particle physics.

07/17/2026

How do you count tree stump rings when they're cracked, weathered and incomplete?

For Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Science’s Simon DeDeo, this became a fascinating mathematical puzzle.

DeDeo, a faculty member in Carnegie Mellon Department of Social and Decision Sciences, built a Bayesian model to identify and reconstruct the tree's growth rings. The challenge was connecting reliable local information into a solution that satisfied the global structure of the tree.

The model's best estimate? This sycamore was at least 67-years-old, meaning it likely began growing before 1959.

Carnegie Mellon faculty see fascinating questions everywhere — even in unexpected places.

07/08/2026

CMU x Heisman 🏈📊🏆

Heisman has partnered with Carnegie Mellon and the Sports Analytics Center to develop metrics and tools to make it easier for fans to access and evaluate performance data for all positions.

Carnegie Mellon Dietrich College's statisticians and data scientists will work closely with Heisman to redevelop a dynamic fan voting experience, providing fans with deeper insight into the race for college football's most prestigious award.