Indian origin Prof appointed Tufts University President

Prof Sunil Kumar, Provost and senior vice president at Johns Hopkins University will begin as Tufts’ 14th president on July 1, 2023

Sunil Kumar, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Johns Hopkins University, has been named the next president of Tufts University by the Board of Trustees. An expert in operations management with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, Kumar was previously dean of the University Of Chicago Booth School Of Business.

He will succeed President Anthony P. Monaco next summer. “Sunil Kumar brings to Tufts a lifelong commitment to excellence in higher education and an exceptionally strong record as a leader, teacher, and colleague,” said Peter Dolan, chair of the Board of Trustees and chair of the presidential search committee.

As provost at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Kumar oversees the academic mission of the university’s nine schools, and has focused on increasing interdisciplinary research and education, enhancing the student experience, and promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

Kumar, whose father was a police officer, was born and raised in India, graduating in 1990 with a bachelor’s in engineering from Mangalore University. He received a master’s degree in 1992 in computer science and automation from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. While there, he met a visiting professor from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who recruited him for a doctoral program in electrical engineering. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1996.

Kumar began his academic career teaching at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he was later the Fred H. Merrill Professor of Operations, Information and Technology. After a dozen years at Stanford, he was named dean of the University Of Chicago Booth School Of Business. In 2016, he became provost and senior vice president at Johns Hopkins.

The first person of color to lead Tufts University, Kumar says that “on the diversity and inclusion front, it is not enough to talk the talk. We also have to make sure that we operationalize our values, and sufficiently resource them so that we can execute on those values and make sure that Tufts is indeed as inclusive as it can be.”

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