Maïté Brandt-Pearce is Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs and Professor of Electrical Engineering. In the Provost’s Office, Brandt-Pearce is responsible for coordinating faculty recruitment and retention efforts university-wide. She also develops and implements faculty policies, oversees the promotion and tenure process at the University, directs faculty development programming, assists faculty in addressing dual career issues, and coordinates efforts to ensure diversity, inclusion, and equity.

Brandt-Pearce joined the University of Virginia faculty in 1993 and the Provost’s Office in 2018. Her primary teaching and research interests are optical communications, specifically visible light communications and cross-layer design of fiber optic networks. Brandt-Pearce is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award and an NSF RIA. She is a co-recipient of Best Paper Awards at ICC 2006 and GLOBECOM 2012 and has over 200 technical publications.

Brandt-Pearce is a graduate of Rice University, where she earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering with a double major in Applied Mathematics, after which she worked with Lockheed in support of NASA Johnson Space Center. She then returned to Rice and earned an M.E.E. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering. In 2015 year, she became Executive Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the School of Engineering. On her watch, the school has seen significant enrollment increases in the PhD program, increases in diversity in the undergraduate program, and a proliferation of high-profile research and entrepreneurship success stories. Brandt-Pearce led the highly collaborative, School-wide Focus for Excellence Initiative that resulted in Engineering’s new mission, vision and core values, and spearheaded Engineering’s staff culture engagement group, emphasizing career development and advancement. She is also Chair of the Board and co-founder of VLNComm, a leading company in Visible Light Communication (VLC) technology, or “Li-Fi”, an alternative data communication technique for wireless applications that uses optical energy to provide simultaneously lighting needs and data transmission.