Santiago Schnell is Provost and Professor of Mathematics at Dartmouth, with adjunct appointments in Biomedical Data Science and Biochemistry & Cell Biology at the Geisel School of Medicine. He previously served as the William K. Warren Foundation Dean of the College of Science at the University of Notre Dame. He earned his DPhil in Mathematics from the University of Oxford, where he was a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church and a Senior Research Fellow of the Wellcome Trust.
An internationally recognized mathematical biologist, Schnell is known for his work on enzyme kinetics and the quantitative modeling of the polymerase chain reaction. Alongside his scientific and academic leadership, he writes on higher education, work and vocation, artificial intelligence, and the relationship between technological progress and human formation. His essays on AI and education, the nature of intelligence, and the future of human work have appeared in The Washington Post, El País, Il Sole 24 Ore, the National Catholic Register, AOC (Analyse Opinion Critique), and Nexo.
His recent writing asks how universities should respond to artificial intelligence without reducing education to the transmission of information or the acquisition of skills, and what dimensions of judgment, intellectual formation, creativity, and human encounter must remain irreducibly human. He has also written on academic freedom and the distinctive vocation of the Catholic university.
Schnell is a member of the American Academy of Sciences & Letters, the Latin American Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Catholic Scholars & Artists, Fellow of the Royal Societies of Chemistry, Biology and Medicine, and a recipient of the Arthur T. Winfree Prize.