Bernadette Louise Dean

Bernadette Louise Dean is a Pakistani academic and educator,

Career In 1983, Dean was working as a social worker in Pakistan's only clinic for heroin addicts. She joined the Aga Khan University Institute for Educational Development in 1996. She was promoted to the rank of assistant professor at the university in 2000.

In 2009, Dean was appointed as the principal of Kinnaird College in Lahore, a prestigious women's institution in Pakistan. She resigned in 2010, to become principal of St. Joseph’s College for Women. At St. Joseph’s Dean introduced a computer science programme for intermediate students and a four-year BBA programme. In 2014, she left St. Joseph's College to join the VM Institute for Education, Karachi, as its director.

In early 2015, Dean was a member of the advisory committee on curriculum and textbook reform and the Sindh Textbook Board when Muslim religious leaders from the Punjab and Sindh began complaining about her work, accusing her of being a foreign woman who was writing curricula and textbooks that were secular and against Islam. She was denounced at the April All-Parties Conference at the Karachi Press Club organized by the Jamaat-e-Islami and its student wing, the Islami Jamiat Talaba. In May, she received phone calls threatening her life and she fled the country.

After leaving Pakistan, Dean became the associate dean for arts and sciences at the University of Central Asia, an international university with campuses in the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan.