The University of Delaware Board of Trustees has selected Provost Laura Carlson to serve as interim president of the University, effective July 1, Board Chair Terri Kelly announced today.

Carlson will succeed Dennis Assanis, the University’s 28th president who recently announced his plans to step down on June 30.

“Provost Carlson has graciously accepted this assignment from the Board,” Kelly said. “With her leadership experience and background in higher education administration, she is an excellent choice to take on this vital role. She and President Assanis will be working closely together to ensure a smooth transition.”

“I am grateful to President Assanis for his vision and dedicated service. Since coming to the University of Delaware three years ago, I have fallen in love with UD — the passion of our students, the brilliance and enduring commitment of our faculty and staff, and our close-knit Blue Hen community that extends from campus throughout the state and beyond,” Carlson said. “I am honored and humbled to be stepping in to guide this very special institution, and I thank the Board of Trustees for their confidence and support. I look forward to convening campus conversations this summer and fall to reaffirm our mission and identity and to together design a path forward that is uniquely our own.”

Kelly said the Board will initiate the process for identifying the permanent president over the course of the next academic year. 

About Laura Carlson

Carlson was named the 12th provost of the University of Delaware in 2022.

Since her arrival at UD, she has been instrumental as provost in enhancing access, enrollment, programming and academic excellence. Spearheading the adoption of a multiyear strategy that integrates financial, enrollment and hiring plans, Carlson’s fresh perspective has redefined the educational experience at the institution as she has led cross-disciplinary teams to help expand pathways to a UD degree and in partnership with the colleges has expanded offerings in winter and summer sessions to create flexibility for students and help them to more easily reach graduation. She has also been a champion of cultivating ideas from faculty and staff, and the provost team has created dynamic tools to help turn those ideas into reality, such as the One Idea, One Slide Summit, and New Program Incubator. Such efforts to advance academic excellence have also been reinforced by her support for improved use and quality of academic spaces across the University.

Before coming to UD, Carlson had more than 20 years of higher education experience at the University of Notre Dame, where she served as vice president, associate provost and dean of the Graduate School. In this role she fostered leadership development and faculty achievement, worked on climate and governance issues, developed a strategic plan that fully articulated a mission of service for the Graduate School and emphasized holistic training for graduate students by integrating a focus on well-being into their scholarly preparation. 

Carlson joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1994 as an assistant professor of psychology, becoming associate professor in 1999 and full professor in 2008. She served as director of graduate studies in the psychology department from 2001-05 and was associate chair of the department from 2007-09. She was named associate dean of professional development in the Graduate School in 2009 and became vice president and associate provost in 2013.

A fellow of the Association of Psychological Science, she has received several teaching awards, including the Rev. Edmund P. Joyce C.S.C. Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

Carlson’s primary research interest is spatial cognition — how we mentally represent the places and objects around us — and her work has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to her work, publishing with scholars across the fields of computer science, engineering, architecture and linguistics. 

Carlson is the coauthor of Functional features in language and space: Insights from perception, categorization, and development, published by Oxford University Press, and her research appears in top leading refereed journals. She has served as associate editor for three premier journals in cognition. Carlson was elected to the governing boards of both the Cognitive Science Society and the Psychonomic Society, where she is past chair of the governing board.

A cum laude graduate of Dartmouth College with a special major in psychology of language, she received a Master of Arts degree at Michigan State University and earned her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.