Remarks from RIT’s 11th president

Greetings and good morning, RIT Tigers!

I’m excited and inspired to be with all of you today, and I am deeply honored and grateful to become this distinguished university’s 11th President.

It is the privilege of a lifetime, and you have my gratitude for placing your trust in me.

There are many people that I am grateful for. 

I am grateful to the Board of Trustees, and particularly Susan Puglia, the chair of the board, who led the Search Committee. To the Search Committee: Thank you for your deep engagement, thoughtful consideration, dedication, and time during the process to identify a new president. It is clear how passionate you are about RIT’s future.

I am also grateful to the colleagues, students, and parents that I have interacted with throughout my career. The community of people I worked with at the University of Arizona, the University of Illinois, and Carnegie Mellon University, all shaped me in innumerable ways, preparing me to join you as president.

And, of course, my deepest gratitude is for my wife, Emily; my children, Elizabeth and Zachary; my parents; my brother; and the rest of my family. My parents instilled in me a deep and lifelong appreciation and quest for learning. My children bring me joy and help me learn to be a whole person, and Emily has been my partner in every step of my personal and professional journey and is as excited as I am to be joining the RIT community. 

Thank you, all!

One of the many things that excited me about RIT is its global reach and presence. Greetings to those watching from all around the world, including our campuses located in Dubai, Croatia, Kosovo, and China. I hope to visit you soon.

I look forward to working with community and government leaders on fruitful partnerships that will be mutually beneficial for Rochester and its surrounding communities, the state, the nation, and the world. Thanks to all of you for being here today.

President Emeritus Bill Destler is also in the audience today. Thank you for being here, Dr. Destler. I understand President Emeritus Al Simone is watching online. Thank you, Dr. Simone, for being here virtually. I look forward to hearing from both of you about your accomplishments and experiences at RIT.

Finally, I would like to thank President Dave Munson and Nancy for their friendship and their warm hospitality and generosity during Emily’s and my visits to Rochester. It’s clear that RIT has thrived under your leadership, President Munson. You have built upon the strong foundation created by the previous presidents, ensuring an even stronger foundation for the RIT community and me to build upon in the future. Thank you.

Susan and the video highlighted some of my accomplishments. Let me start by telling you in a more personal way how I arrived at this point, and why I am thrilled to be RIT’s next president. My advice to students when thinking about their careers (and just about everything else in life) is to follow their passion and chart a course that interests and inspires them—and the rest will work out.

My passion is to have a positive impact on the world. For the first 16 years of my career at Arizona and Illinois, I pursued that passion through my research group’s technical impact and through the students I inspired in the classroom. Once I made the jump to academic leadership, I became passionate about taking each organization I led to the next level of excellence.

My scholarly passion is building computer-based systems that are dependable, trustworthy, and secure. That passion goes back to my time as an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, when I took several courses from Prof. John F. Meyer, who would eventually become my Ph.D. advisor. John taught me to think expansively, and that an interdisciplinary approach with a talented group of experts was needed to create systems that society can depend on.

That approach ultimately led me to working at Illinois with people from varied academic backgrounds, national labs, government, and industry to make our power grid more secure and resilient to cyber and physical attacks. The research centers that I led taught me the importance of collaboration to achieve seemingly impossible goals. And students—not surprisingly—were often the basis for the most creative ideas. 

My transition from Illinois to Carnegie Mellon was due to its unique character. It’s one of the top academic institutions in the world, a place where people do the work that matters most today, and a nimble place where people are not afraid to roll up their sleeves to get things done. After its founding in 1900 as the Carnegie Technical Schools, serving the children of Andrew Carnegie’s steel works in the Pittsburgh area, it became the four-year degree-granting Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912. In 1967, “Carnegie Tech,” merged with the Mellon Institute to become Carnegie Mellon University. CMU is not only strong in technology, but also a world-leader in the arts.

Sound familiar to RIT’s story?

When I became aware of the search for a president for RIT, I was surprised and intrigued by the similarities I saw in the histories of RIT and CMU, the shared importance of creativity and innovation, and the strength of both schools in technology, the arts, and design.

It quickly became clear to me that RIT is a very special place. It also became clear to me that RIT has taken a unique approach on its path to excellence, working at the intersection of technology, the arts, and design. I also very much appreciated that RIT’s acceleration in excellence has been due to it charting its own way—being strategic in picking the intellectual areas that it focuses on and creating an identity that does not seek to replicate what others are doing. I was excited to see that RIT uniquely combines technological strengths in areas that matter most to society with the arts and humanities and understands that creativity and innovation permeate all those fields.

You should all be very proud of what you have created—a university that is relentlessly forward looking. RIT has academic programs at all degree levels that are the first of their kind. I was also drawn to RIT’s characteristics that include:

• A strong belief in experiential learning outside the classroom.
• The creation of a culture and support system to attract a large and diverse group of students, including the world-renowned National Technical Institute for the Deaf.
• The fact that students choose RIT for its unique characteristics and inclusive culture.
• A strong and distinctive faculty and staff dedicated to preparing students to be leaders, innovators, creative thinkers, and visionaries and to creating new knowledge, through fundamental and applied research, that makes the world a better place.

This is clearly RIT’s time! 

Careers that combine technology and the arts are in more demand than ever, and RIT is a leader providing education that enables students to directly and immediately make a positive impact in the workforce after graduation, as well as learn skills that will enable them to continue to be leaders throughout their career.

I am excited that RIT is in the process of creating a new Strategic Plan. Together, with shared governance, we will build a plan that will respect RIT’s unique culture and will embrace and drive the expansion of RIT’s ability to educate the world’s most creative, bold, and innovative problem solvers. We will take RIT to the next level of preeminence, establishing it as a strong Carnegie R1 Research University on its own terms, retaining the unique brand that makes it attractive to students. These goals will be achieved by building upon the university community’s desire to have direct, profound, and transformative impact, often through an avant-garde interdisciplinary approach.

While the details of what we will do together will be the result of the creation of the plan, I can tell you today I will be a president that listens and collaborates with all stakeholders. I will embrace RIT’s unique culture and together we will identify major initiatives that will increase RIT’s stature worldwide.

Going forward:

• I will work with the RIT community to reinvent education for the 21st Century, creating a new engagement for our amazing students that makes use of technology, such as Generative AI and learning science, and that transcends geography—leveraging RIT’s multiple campuses to educate students that have a global perspective.
• I will work with the community to further develop RIT’s research impact and stature by growing its Ph.D. programs and research activity to create solutions to pressing world problems with a local understanding and context.
• I will work with the RIT community to recruit, retain, and develop eminent faculty and staff that share RIT’s vision and are driven to make the world a better place.
• I will work with the RIT community to create an environment where everyone belongs and can thrive.
• I will, with the active engagement of the community, be an ardent and successful fundraiser to provide the resources needed for our shared vision.

Let me conclude by saying that RIT has a strong momentum, which we can capitalize on to make it “the” destination for students that value its unique brand and to conduct research to solve the world’s most challenging problems. 

RIT’s brand of “Innovation, Creativity, Passion, Curiosity, and Joy” combining excellence in technology, the arts, and design resonates very strongly with me, and I know will resonate very strongly with a growing number of students and provide the inspiration for world-changing research.

It is a great honor and privilege to become your next president.

I am eager to meet members of the RIT family and the Greater Rochester community today. 

This is an extraordinary time for RIT!

Thank you and Go Tigers!