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The College of Sciences and Arts was established in June of 1917 during President E.O. Holland's reorganization of academic departments within the State College of Washington. In 1948, the position of Dean of the College of Sciences and Arts was discontinued, and four Associate Deans (Physical Sciences, Biological Sciences, Humanities, and Social Sciences) were created in its place. In 1953, the position of Dean was recreated, and two Associate Dean (Physical Sciences, Humanities) positions were retained. In 1965/1966, the College was split into two (Division of Science, Division of Liberal Arts), each with its own Dean. In 1993, the College of Sciences and Arts was divided into two separate colleges, the College of Liberal Arts and the College of Sciences. In 2012 they were rejoined as the College of Arts and Sciences.

During the period covered by these records, Robert “Bob” Nilan was Dean of the Division of Sciences, within the College of Sciences and Arts, 1989. Michael Griswold was appointed as acting Dean for one year. Leon Radziemski became Dean in 1990 and was in that position when the Division transitioned to the College of Sciences in 1993.

Robert A. Nilan (1923-2015) was born in British Columbia, and received his undergraduate and master's degrees from the University of British Columbia (1946, 1948). He earned his Ph.D. in Genetics from the University of Wisconsin (1951), and in that same year he was appointed as a Research Associate at Washington State College. In 1952, he was appointed Assistant Professor and Assistant Agronomist, rising to the rank of Professor and Agronomist in 1961. He served as Dean of the Division of Sciences from 1979 to 1989, and retired from WSU in 1992 after a 40-year career. Known as "Barley Bob," he was an internationally recognized expert in mutations, cytogenetics, and breeding of barley, and was the coordinator of the North American Barley Genome Mapping Project. He was a prolific scholar who published extensively, and he earned many honors and awards, including a Fulbright and a Guggenheim fellowship. In 2015 he was given the Washington State University President's Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Leon J. Radziemski (1937-) was born in Worcester, MA, and earned an undergraduate degree in Physics at the College of the Holy Cross in 1958, and then both his master’s in Physics (1961) and doctoral in Atomic Physics (1964) from Purdue University. He was a staff physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1967 to 1983, Physics department chair at New Mexico State University from 1983 to 1988, and associate dean of Arts and Sciences at NMSU from 1988 to 1990. In 1990, he came to WSU as Dean of the Division of Sciences, and remained in that role, through the Division’s transition to a College, until he retired in 2002. He is known for high-resolution spectroscopy of atoms and molecules, for his pioneering experiments in laser isotope separation, and for discovering new applications for low-energy laser-induced plasmas. In 1996 he was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.