Dear UTA campus community,

It’s with great enthusiasm I tell you that Kate C. Miller will become UTA’s vice president for research and innovation on Oct. 1. Kate has more than two decades of leadership experience in higher education, most recently serving as the provost and vice president for academic affairs at the University of Wyoming; previously, she spent time in Texas at both Texas A&M University and the University of Texas at El Paso. Kate emerged as the top candidate from our comprehensive national search process and will join the Maverick family to provide strategic oversight of our research and innovation efforts.

Supported by our strategic focus areas, UTA is striving to be one of the nation’s most inclusive and impactful research universities. As vice president for research and innovation, Kate will play a vital role in achieving this vision as she leads our collective efforts to advance UTA’s $100 million-plus research enterprise while fostering a strong interdisciplinary focus across the University.

On behalf of the Maverick community, I want to express my appreciation to the 13-member search committee and its chair, Marion Ball, the Raj and Indra Nooyi Endowed Distinguished Chair in Bioengineering and executive director of the Multi-Interprofessional Center for Health Informatics. The thorough efforts of this group led us to a leader with a distinguished record, and I am so grateful.  

Additionally, I am filled with pride for how our campus actively participated in this search process. Thank you for nominating candidates, attending the finalist forums, and completing our finalist feedback surveys so that the perspectives of our faculty, staff, and students could be reflected in this decision.

While we celebrate the addition of Kate to our senior leadership team, please join me in thanking Jim Grover for graciously serving as interim vice president for research since October 2019. Under Jim’s watch, UTA achieved Texas Tier One status and was reaffirmed as a Carnegie R-1 institution—two accomplishments that are heavily predicated on our research success. I look forward to what we will achieve with Jim’s expertise fully dedicated to his role as dean of the Graduate School.

Thank you again for the efforts and contributions that made today’s announcement possible. We have three active executive searches remaining, and I appreciate all of the work being done to ensure those are as fruitful as this one. We’re welcoming many new faces to UTA in the coming months, and I am eager to witness the fresh, diverse perspectives they bring to our already first-class community of students, faculty, and staff.