Karl Dean is the sixth mayor of the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County. He was elected on September 11, 2007 in a runoff election, following a general election where he also received the most votes.

Dean’s priorities are improving schools, making neighborhoods safer and bringing more and better jobs to Nashville. In his first one hundred days as mayor, he established the Project for Student Success, a forty-member task force charged with developing steps to reduce high school dropout rates. Dean also began a series of town hall meetings on education focused on the needs of individual school clusters across Davidson County.

Dean first held public office in 1990, when he was elected as Nashville’s public defender, a post to which he was re-elected in 1994 and 1998. He served as metro law director from 1999 until 2007, when he resigned to run for the office of mayor. He completed the program for senior executives in state and local government at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1999. Dean has also served as an adjunct professor of law at Vanderbilt University.