John Lavine is the dean of Medill, where he is leading the school in a sweeping transformation. That strategic plan focuses on 21st Century quality journalism and integrated marketing communications and on understanding what motivates and inhibits audiences to use each medium. Lavine is also a professor of media management and strategy in Medill and in the Kellogg School of Management.

Prior to becoming dean in January of 2006, he was the founding director of Northwestern's Media Management Center. He regularly educates senior executives in leading print, broadcast, and digital media companies in the U.S. and abroad and teaches graduate students from Medill and Kellogg in the media management MBA major at Kellogg.

Since 1999, he has led major industry research projects that explore many of the major challenges and opportunities that confront the media, such as how to better understand audiences and how to enhance the impact and usage of journalism, news, marketing and advertising.

From 2000 to 2002, the Media Management Center's Readership Institute (RI), which Lavine directed, completed the largest studies ever done on newspaper readership for the Newspaper Publishers Assertion and the American Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2003-04 the Media Management Center studied the experiences of readers of U.S. consumer magazines for the Magazine Publishers Association. It is now used by many magazines and magazine groups and is part of the new metrics of leading advertising agencies. In 2005, the Center completed a national study for the Online Publishers Association (OPA) that explored the experiences and usage of consumers on the major Web sites and portals.

On the global front, in 2004, Lavine founded the International Media Management Academic Association (IMMAA), the first such organization with membership in all major parts of the world. In 1985, he founded the Inter American Press Association's study of Latin American daily newspapers, and each year since, he has directed that study as well as a media management seminar in Central or South America.

Before coming to Northwestern, Lavine was the John and Elizabeth Bates Cowles Professor of Media Management and Economics at the University of Minnesota. Prior to that and for more than 25 years, he was publisher/editor of four daily and four weekly newspapers in Wisconsin. During those years, he also was an executive of an international film company in London and the United States that did most of its work for television and was president and publisher of an international medical journal publishing company.