The Board of Trustees voted unanimously to elect Sunil Kumar as the 14th president of Tufts University. Dr. Kumar, who currently serves as provost and senior vice president for academic affairs of Johns Hopkins University, will assume office on July 1, 2023. He will be the first Asian American and the first person of color to assume the Tufts presidency.

Dr. Kumar is an extremely accomplished university leader who impressed the presidential search committee with his devotion to diversity and inclusion within higher education, his commitment to building collaborative partnerships among faculty and students, and his strong belief in the power of the university to positively impact society. He will bring to the Tufts presidency his experience as a leader of large and complex higher education institutions and his talent for building innovative programs while harnessing the strengths of the entire academic and administrative enterprise. I firmly believe that he is the perfect successor to President Anthony P. Monaco, who has set the university on an amazing upward trajectory of growth and success during his 11 years as president.

A first-generation American who immigrated to the United States in the early 1990s, Dr. Kumar’s rise from a graduate Ph.D. student to the Tufts presidency in a period of about three decades is truly remarkable. It is a testament to his academic brilliance, strong personal values, and his unique leadership qualities. I invite you to begin to get to know him by reading more about him on Tufts Now.

Dr. Kumar is a widely published expert on operations management and research. He studies systems affected by stochastic variability via mathematical models and investigates the performance evaluation of manufacturing systems, service operations, and communications networks. After receiving his Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1996 from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Dr. Kumar spent 14 years as a faculty member at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. At Stanford, he also served as senior associate dean for academic affairs, overseeing the school’s MBA program. He then served as the dean for the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business for six years before arriving at Johns Hopkins as provost in 2016. At Johns Hopkins, he has had particular success in recruiting exceptional faculty members through the Bloomberg Distinguished Professorships program and the Faculty Diversity Initiative and has also markedly improved the student experience through improved student-focused services at the institution.

Dr. Kumar’s selection is the outcome of a rigorous global search process. The presidential search committee, aided by the search firm Isaacson, Miller, took great care in considering exceptional candidates from across the academic spectrum, which resulted in a very diverse pool of candidates through an inclusive and thoughtful process. 

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