DEAN MILLS is a professor and the dean of the Missouri School of Journalism. His research interests include international journalism, journalism ethics, cross-cultural journalism and qualitative methods. Mills is an author of a Ford Foundation study on race and the news and a book on cross-cultural journalism, Journalism Across Cultures, that he co-authored with Missouri School of Journalism colleagues Fritz Cropp and Cynthia Frisby.

Mills began his academic career at the University of Illinois, where he completed a doctorate in communications in 1981. Before coming to Missouri in 1989, he served as director of Pennsylvania State University’s School of Journalism and then as coordinator of graduate study in communications at California State University, Fullerton.

Before entering academia, Mills worked as a professional journalist. He became Moscow Bureau Chief for the Baltimore Sun in 1969, after earning a master’s degree in journalism at the University of Michigan and a bachelor’s degree in Russian and journalism at the University of Iowa. From 1972 to 1975 he was a Sun correspondent in Washington, D.C., where he covered the Watergate scandal, the resignation of Vice President Spiro T. Agnew and the Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision.