MUNCIE, Ind. -- Eric Damian Kelly will step down as dean of Ball State University’s College of Architecture and Planning at the end of the fall semester, university officials announced Tuesday.

Kelly resigned from the position he accepted in 1995 and will take a leave of absence during the spring semester before joining Ball State’s urban planning faculty in the fall of 1999.

A national search for a new dean will begin immediately. Jeffrey Hall, the college’s associate dean, has been named acting dean effective Jan. 1 and will serve until a permanent replacement is appointed.

"Eric Kelly has been an enthusiastic dean who instilled a sense of energy in the College of Architecture and Planning," said C. Warren Vander Hill, Ball State’s provost and vice president for academic affairs.

"Off campus, he has developed a national reputation and has been very involved in the local community as a contributor to several projects," Vander Hill said. "His main interests lie in the classroom and professional writing."

Kelly came to Ball State after chairing Iowa State University’s Department of Community and Regional Planning. He was also a private practice planner and lawyer in Colorado for 15 years and vice president of the Philadelphia planning and design firm Rahenkamp, Sachs, Wells and Associates. He is serving a two-year term as president of the American Planning Association.

Hall has been associate dean of Ball State’s nationally recognized College of Architecture and Planning since 1982 and joined the landscape architecture faculty in 1979. He was also acting dean for a semester in 1989 and chaired the landscape architecture department from 1980 to 1982.

He has a private landscape architecture practice in Muncie and serves on the board of directors of the Architectural Research Centers Consortium. He is also secretary and executive committee member of the American Society of Landscape Architects’ Indiana Chapter and a member of the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture. He has been national president, director and scholarship chair of Sigma Lambda Alpha.

Hall has a master of landscape architecture degree from Iowa State University and a bachelor’s degree with honors in landscape architecture from the University of Massachusetts.