[3][6][7] He was a professor at Brown University from 1993 to 2007, holding roles including department chair, acting vice president for computing and information services, and deputy provost.

[13][14][15][16][17] Dean played a leading role in the adoption of the framework of Markov decision processes (MDPs) as a foundational tool in artificial intelligence.

[30] Working with his collaborators, James Allen and Yiannis Aloimonos specializing in respectively computer vision and natural language processing, Dean wrote one of the first modern AI textbooks incorporating probability theory, machine learning and robotics, and placing traditional AI topics such as symbolic reasoning and knowledge representation using the predicate calculus within a broader context.

[31] As co-chair of the 1991 AAAI Conference Dean organized a press event featuring mobile robots carrying trays of canapés and barely avoiding the participants.

[35] After starting as a research scientist at Google, Dean was appointed as a consulting professor at Stanford and began teaching a course with the title Computational Models of the Neocortex.

Early on, Dean worked with Christof Koch the chief scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Neuroscience to develop a partnership, and hired Viren Jain from HHMI to serve as the technical lead for the project.

As their computer vision and machine learning tools improved, the team sought out and developed additional partnerships with Gerry Rubin at HHMI Janelia Campus, Jeff Lichtman at Harvard, and Winfried Denk at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology.

Each of these collaborations would lead to high-accuracy, dense reconstructions of neural tissue samples in different organisms, repeatedly surpassing the current state of the art in size and quality.

As Deputy Provost he helped develop and launch new multidisciplinary programs in genomics and the brain sciences as well as oversee substantial changes in the medical school and university libraries.