President’s Posts

We performed the 16th heart transplant in human history more than half century ago. And we continue to be on the front lines of the war against mankind’s greatest killer.   Every year, about 630,000 Americans die of heart disease. That’s a staggering number. To put it in tragic perspective, that’s like losing the entire […]

This is a particularly exciting time at Virginia Commonwealth University because we’re celebrating significant milestones from our past as we chart strategic stepping stones for our future. When this institution began in 1838, no one could have imagined the enormous impact we’d make in 2019.

  For many years, I have talked about making sure that what we do at VCU matter beyond our own campus, about focusing our limited resources toward solving urgent and vital problems people face, amd about making the biggest possibilities of life more accessible to more people. Since 1838, we have committed to being a […]

Dear VCU community, A warm welcome to the start of a semester filled with milestones, history and progress. This fall, we welcome more than 8,000 new students to Virginia Commonwealth University, including 4,600 first-year students, the largest class in our history. In addition, the first-year class is minority majority at 55%. In all, 31,000 students […]

Dear members of the VCU and VCU Health communities: I am pleased to announce that P. Srirama Rao, Ph.D., will become the new Vice President for Research and Innovation, effective Oct. 1. Dr. Rao – no relation to me — comes to VCU from the University of Minnesota, where he is professor and associate dean for […]

This holiday season, I am reminded of the many reasons to celebrate Virginia Commonwealth University. This fall, my faculty colleagues broke institutional records for research and creative activity for the ninth time in the last 10 years, topping $275 million and helping us land among the nation’s top 100 research universities. That is according to […]