The start of the academic year brings excitement, a burst of activity across campus, new students and, this year, new leadership. 

Over the summer, Tulane University announced Marcilynn Burke as the new dean of Tulane Law School; Sarah Cunningham as the new vice president of Student Affairs; Susan Davies as the interim dean of the School of Social Work; and Hridesh Rajan as the new dean of the School of Science and Engineering. 

Each are distinguished leaders in their respective fields and bring a wealth of experience and knowledge to the university. Although, their disciplines differ, they are connected in their goals. Each plan to leverage and enhance the excellence of the university while keeping students at the core by providing the best quality education and experiences for them to succeed at Tulane and beyond.

Marcilynn Burke

Tulane Law School was first on Marcilynn Burke’s radar more than 20 years ago when she interviewed to be a professor. She wasn’t offered the job, but her path eventually led her back to Tulane and at the right time. 

“I don’t think I would be here in this seat now as dean, if I had started my academic career here,” said Burke, who began her role as dean of Tulane Law School on August 5 after a career that included private practice, academia and a presidential appointment. 

Most recently Burke served as dean of law and the Dave Frohnmayer Chair in Leadership and Law at the University of Oregon. Prior to that, she was law professor at the University of Houston. From 2009 to 2013, she served in the U.S. Department of the Interior where she was deputy director for programs and policy for the Bureau of Land Management and was appointed acting assistant secretary for land and minerals management by President Barack Obama. She then returned to the University of Houston as an associate professor and later served as associate dean. Before entering academia, she was in private practice focusing on environmental law, antitrust and civil and criminal litigation. 

Throughout her accomplished career, she kept her eyes on Tulane. 

“It’s been consistently excellent,” Burke said. “Some schools go up and down but Tulane, throughout all these years, has been really a shining example of a law school that is excellent in its academics, excellent in its service to the community and continues to attract the brightest students, faculty and staff.” 

One of Burke’s priorities is to begin a strategic planning process in which she will meet with faculty and staff to identify immediate and longstanding goals for the school. 

“I’ve asked all the faculty and staff in this first round of information gathering to give me up to three pages of what they think our short- and long-term goals should be and invite them to meet with me,” she said. “We want to make sure that we don’t rest on our laurels when it comes to our centers of excellence that we have already, but also to be thinking about are there other areas that we should be pursuing or expanding upon?”

Burke plans to deepen her knowledge of the Tulane Law community by meeting with alumni, along with university, school and local leaders. Another focus is enhancing student outcomes, particularly continued consistent passage of the bar exam and the furthering of employment opportunities. 

“We bring in some of the most talented students from all over the world, so they’re coming here expecting excellence, and we want to make sure that, as they leave, they have ample opportunities to pursue justice however they frame it in the world,” Burke said. 

The key theme in her work will always be to keep students first and foremost in mind as she wants the “very best” for them, both in law school and post-graduation. Similarly, she plans to support faculty and staff in achieving their goals while continuing to recruit top legal scholars. 

In her role so far, Burke said, it already “feels like home.” 

“This is more akin to the way that I grew up; people invite you into their homes and they hug you when they first meet you,” she said. “It’s a literal warm embrace that I have felt upon my arrival.”

Sarah Cunningham

“The things that you don’t plan for become one of the best opportunities,” Sarah Cunningham, the new vice president for Student Affairs at Tulane, said of first learning about the position opening at Tulane. 

Cunningham, who has over two decades of experience in working in student affairs at higher education institutions such as Johns Hopkins, the University of Florida, George Mason University and the University of Chicago, was serving as vice president of student development at Saint Louis University when she got a call from a search firm about the “perfect job.” 

She was in her role at Saint Louis for just over three years and wasn’t necessarily looking elsewhere. But, as she learned more about the role and Tulane, she followed her intuition and applied.

“The excitement and interest grew with each step of the process,” Cunningham said. 

Once in the interview process, Tulane’s strong ties to community were evident to her. 

“Tulane has a longstanding history around community engagement and community service,” she said. “It’s one thing to read those things but then when you actually interact with the students and see their intellectual curiosity and their passion for how they can apply what they’re learning in the classroom to better serve their communities, it’s quite inspiring.”

Tulane’s deep commitment to the student experience was “loud and clear” and another draw for Cunningham. She said staff members and senior leadership conveyed “really wanting students to have a good, tying relationship with New Orleans but also to have pride in being a Tulane student.” She cited the Strategy for Tomorrow, Tulane’s university-wide strategic plan to advancing and guiding equity, diversity and inclusion and anti-racism initiatives, as a key example of that commitment already in action. 

“For me, that’s really important because when a student has a sense of belonging, that’s going to lead to their ability to thrive. And to be at a place who wants me to think creatively and think how we can further that sense of belonging for students was really exciting,” Cunningham said. 

Cunningham, who started her new role on August 1, will dedicate much of her initial time to relationship-building with students, staff, faculty and fellow cabinet members. The goals are to identify what is working well for students — undergraduate, graduate and professional — and understand what unintended barriers they experience. She also plans to “work in partnership with my colleagues to make sure when we recruit and invite students to enroll here that we’re giving them this outstanding experience in which they get to discover their passions, hone their skills and then go off and make the world a better place.”  

Much of the long-term goals will be tied to what is learned from the initial phase of connecting with her new community but, Cunningham says, efforts and initiatives will always be rooted in student wellness and taking a holistic approach to supporting students.   

“I am excited to join a campus where it’s a community approach to supporting our students to ensure they can thrive and know they are cared for,” she said. 

Of her new role, Cunningham said, “I’m excited to be a part of the Tulane community. The new Class of 2028 doesn’t know this yet, but I’d love to make myself an honorary member.” 

Susan Davies

In July, Tulane announced that Susan Davies, associate dean of research at the School of Social Work, would assume the role of interim dean of the school. 

Davies, a public health behavioral scientist, joined Tulane in 2020 after a distinguished 30-year career at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) where she held numerous scientific appointments including at UAB’s Center for AIDS Research, Minority Health Research Center and Center for Clinical and Translational Science. As associate dean at Tulane, she helped to lead the creation of the School of Social Work’s Office of Research. 

Now as interim dean, Davies plans to lead the school for the next two years while a search for a permanent dean launches in fall 2025. 

“My job is to lay the groundwork for that in terms of rebuilding our community so that we can attract a very strong candidate to lead us to a stronger future.” 

Davies plans to increase excellence in the school’s academic programs and will take a “deep dive” into examining the school’s curriculum. 

“We acknowledge our deep history in the Gulf South and want to continue improving the unmatched immersed social work education to our students who come to New Orleans to experience our community-imbedded education and field placement experiences that enable them to serve our many community partners under the guidance and supervision of our best clinicians,” she said. 

Davies wants to ensure that same excellence and offerings translate to online students, too. The School of Social Work was the first at Tulane to take its master’s program online in 2018. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, more students nationwide are opting to take classes online.

“How can we provide better services to our students … our classroom experiences and our online experiences so that no one feels disconnected?” she said. 

Davies also plans to increase on-ground enrollment in the master’s and doctorate programs as well as the school’s Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy and the new social work undergraduate minor. 

“Social work has so many applications, whether you plan to go to medical school or become an entrepreneur, our social work minor teaches students valuable life skills that will serve them well in their personal and professional lives, whatever path they take after graduating Tulane.” 

Increasing community engagement, specifically through the school’s Center for Lifelong Learning and the Porter Cason Institute, is another priority for Davies. The center offers continuing education and trainings to professionals in Louisiana and the Gulf South region. The institute also offers advanced clinical training and community projects to School of Social Work students, faculty, field supervisors and practitioners as well as professionals regionally and nationally. The institute aims to enhance the teaching and learning of mental health and clinical interventions to advance family therapy practice. 

Continuing to increase the school’s research is on her to-do list, too. She already has efforts in the works for larger mentoring opportunities for faculty, especially junior faculty, to support them in their new and continued research. 

“Our faculty have great expertise — in trauma-informed care, substance misuse, HIV, mental health issues and disaster resilience. We’re in a unique position to make significant contributions to both the scientific and practice communities in all of these areas.” 

Although Davies is not new to Tulane, she is reminded of that same excitement that drew her in: “Tulane has so much to offer, and New Orleans has so much to offer. I continue to be excited and see more that I can do and that we can do together.” 

Hridesh Rajan

Hridesh Rajan, the new dean of the School of Science and Engineering, never set out to be a university administrator, but he couldn’t be happier with where he ended up. 

Rajan started out working at Bell Labs after receiving his bachelor’s degree in computer science. While studying for his master’s and PhD, he realized how much he enjoyed communicating his research to other academics and decided to remain in academia, going on to become a professor. 

“Those will be my happiest days, in front of students,” he said. 

The more time he spent as a professor, the more excited he got about creating new programs and educational initiatives, which is what led him to working in administration. Just prior to arriving at Tulane he served as the Kingland professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science at Iowa State University.  While at Iowa State, he led the development of new degree programs in artificial intelligence and computer science and launched many efforts to encourage and facilitate interdisciplinary research, something he hopes to continue at Tulane. 

Rajan recently relocated with his family to New Orleans from Iowa. “We had visited a few times, and each time we visited, we have enjoyed being here, but living here is absolutely different,” he said. “It’s an amazing experience, and we are just so thrilled to be here.”

One of the reasons Rajan is so excited to be in New Orleans is that Tulane is perfectly positioned to take on some of the most important questions facing humanity right now. “We are particularly strong in health, we are particularly strong in energy, we are particularly strong in climate and AI and data science,” he said. “These are areas that are going to drive the future.” 

Tulane is also filled with people who are excited to work with others outside of their own discipline, something Rajan says is essential for facing the challenges of the future. 

“Most problems of any significance in the next decade or two will require folks across multiple disciplines to pull their ideas together, pull their disciplines together, work across disciplinary boundaries, to be able to solve problems and to help society with some of the bigger challenges that we are going to be facing in the next two decades,” he said.

Since he started his new position in July, Rajan has been getting familiar with the uptown campus and meeting with faculty, staff and students in order to understand as much about the school as he can. His leadership style is focused on listening, he said, which allows him to understand what everyone in the organization needs so he can see the best way forward for everyone. 

“The School of Science and Engineering is in a great place, I feel, and I’m really looking forward to learning as much as I can about the school, the faculty, staff and students, to see where we can remove hurdles to continue to make progress,” Rajan said.