Meet the Provost

Tamara L. Brown, Ph.D.

Tamara L. Brown, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at The University of Texas at Arlington, is the University's chief academic officer, responsible for its primary mission of promoting and achieving academic excellence, student success, and lifelong learning.

In this role, she oversees the University's nine colleges and schools along with key operational units such as the Division of Student Success, Student Affairs, Academic Affairs, Enrollment Management, Extension and Extended Campus, UTA Libraries, and more. She also helps lead UTA's bold faculty hiring initiative, Recruiting Innovative Scholars for Excellence, a $60 million effort to add 100 new tenure-system faculty in just three years.

Dr. Brown has dedicated her administrative career to improving student success, increasing retention, and creating new opportunities for learning. In her leadership roles, she also has worked collaboratively with faculty to promote their scholarship, increase their research and grant activity, and strengthen their teaching. She is committed to promoting and achieving academic excellence at one of the most diverse campuses in the nation. In 2024, she was among 30 distinguished senior-level higher education professionals selected for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities 2024-25 Millennium Leadership Initiative. In 2025, Dr. Brown was selected by The Dallas Examiner as a distinguished honoree for The Great Conversation: Celebrating Black Women in Dallas Making a Difference.<

Prior to joining UTA in 2022 and becoming its first Black female provost, Brown held executive dean, dean, and interim dean positions at the University of North Texas and Prairie View A&M University, where she also served as executive director of the Texas Juvenile Crime Prevention Center. A trained clinical psychologist, Brown started her career as faculty at Medical University of South Carolina and later served as an associate professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky.

Brown has conducted research on the efficacy of Texas faith-based institutions to improve mental health awareness among African Americans as well as a 12-year longitudinal study on the effectiveness of more than 60 community-based youth development programs across 13 Texas counties. She is the co-author of a book on African American fraternities and sororities, assistant editor for the journal Addiction, and former editor-in-chief of the Journal of Knowledge and Best Practices in Juvenile Justice & Psychology.

She earned her doctoral and masters' degrees in clinical psychology from the University of Illinois and a bachelor's degree in psychology from Longwood College. She also has a Master of Divinity from Asbury Theological Seminary.