He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Vanderbilt University in 1987, with a doctoral thesis titled "Contractible Edges and Conjectures and Path and Cycle Numbers".
[7] In 1997 Dean received the Bell Labs President's Silver Award,[8] and shortly thereafter began a professorship at Rice University.
[11] Dean focused on mathematics education and outreach throughout his time at Texas State, most notably by serving as President of NAM from 2005 to 2015.
In addition to his involvement in the PBS series Life by the Numbers, he developed software to teach discrete mathematics at the K-12 level.
Dean's fifth and final Ph.D. student graduated from Texas State University in 2010, with a thesis on secondary school mathematics pedagogy.