Welcome back to campus for what will be a wonderful spring semester filled with many opportunities to engage, learn, and create.

This past fall, we’ve had several tremendous occasions to celebrate, including a coveted NASA fellowship for fourth-year physics graduate student Jake McCoy; the election of another member of our faculty, Dale Abel, to the National Academies; and a season for the ages on the football field. As wonderful as our fall semester was, spring is the opportune time to anticipate new growth.

With that in mind, I am looking forward to the continued development of our shared direction and how, together, we will build momentum. As you may know, we started this listening process through our shared governance structure after Thanksgiving break. In order to continue this communication and collaborative planning, we are having a town hall meeting Feb. 23 in C20 Pomerantz Center from 4 to 6 p.m.

This meeting will allow me and members of our administrative team the opportunity to engage our community in campus dialogue through an open forum. In order to ensure we have a productive conversation, I have asked Executive Vice President and Provost Barry Butler and Interim Senior Vice President of Finance and Operations Rod Lehnertz to participate in the forum. I would also like to take this moment to share with you that I have submitted Rod’s name to the Board of Regents as the permanent Senior VP of Finance and Operations, along with that of Terry Johnson for Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer.

I have also asked Rod and Barry to lead two new campus committees that will focus on short-term and long-term issues, respectively. You can find out more about these committees here. As we engage the whole campus in this process, I am looking forward to working with so many great university citizens.

This is a truly exciting time for our university. As we look forward to the completion of so many construction projects, it is important that we turn our focus to the research, teaching, scholarship, creative activity, and clinical service that will occur in these facilities. The colleagues with whom we work and study each day will forge the future of our university, and we are lucky to live in such a vibrant and rich community.

I look forward to seeing you on campus, and I am thankful for everything that you do for our university.