Ayanna Thomas will serve as the dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, as announced in an email to the community on Feb. 3. Thomas will continue to serve in her current role as dean of research until an internal search for the position is complete, according to Bárbara Brizuela, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences.
Thomas will take over the position from Brizuela, who had held both positions since July after being named head of Tufts’ largest undergraduate program.
Thomas began her career at Tufts in 2007 as an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology. That same year, she established the meta-Cognition and Applied Memory Lab and later was promoted to be an associate professor in 2013 and professor of psychology in 2019. Thomas previously served as the director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Psychology for five years.
“I really want to create a space where [graduate students] not only can get the degree that they want and they need, but they actually can thrive in our environment,” Thomas said. “I want to make sure that our graduate students are being trained for the kind of world that they’re going to be going out into, having a degree that really helps them achieve the kinds of goals that they want to achieve and help us in the ever changing world.”
Brizuela, who helped pick Thomas for the position, said a major factor in her selection was that Thomas was “very strong and very productive.”
“Psychology has our largest PhD program in the School of Arts and Sciences, and I had seen her work as director of [Graduate] Studies,” Brizuela said. “She is a fantastic mentor, she runs a very active research group, so she has that understanding of graduate education [and] what it takes to be a good mentor.”
“[She] had done a fantastic job as dean of research, contributing to the significant increase in research expenditures in the school,” Brizuela said, adding that Thomas “managed the entire research administration team really well.”
Only one week into her new appointment, Dean Thomas has begun considering the expansion of graduate programs, such as the Fifth-Year Master’s Degree Program, along with the creation of new ones.
“She, already in her first week, is identifying possible new programs that we can design that are very well aligned with our undergraduate student experiences [and] even some new four plus one programs,” Brizuela said. “I’m excited about the new ideas that she is going to be bringing to the table that are going to continue to allow Tufts to be a really exciting place for grad students to come.”
As the new dean of the graduate school, Thomas wants to give greater emphasis on interdisciplinary programs for graduate students.
“That’s going to relate to thinking more broadly about interdisciplinary kinds of programs that might better equip graduate students to move into spaces where they can think about technology but also from a humanistic perspective,” Thomas said.
Thomas added that interdisciplinary programs allow students to be more flexible in changing environments.
“I feel like our world is ever-changing. And that’s the thing that I think interdisciplinary spaces help learners be better equipped to deal with,” she said. “Because it allows you to be flexible in the way that you’re thinking about a particular problem and also a particular career path.”
Thomas said that her experience as a cognitive scientist puts her in a uniquely qualified position to implement interdisciplinary programs “because cognitive science is, by its nature, an interdisciplinary kind of discipline.”
When weighing the benefits and drawbacks of graduate school, Thomas highlighted the benefits of “scaffolded learning” at Tufts that students won’t achieve from “online boot camps.”
“You have this exchange of ideas across the spectrum of expertise that allows people that don’t have domain expertise to gather that knowledge and come along, but also share their unique perspective on how to solve that problem,” she said.
Thomas addressed the challenges faced by President Donald Trump’s attempted cuts to federal funding.
“There are always setbacks when there are shifts that are so dramatic that we have to shift the way we’ve been doing something,” she said. “We are adaptable and we really do our best creative problem solving when under pressure to do that.”
Samantha Eng contributed reporting.
