Welcome to the Spring 2026 Semester
Dear VCU community,
It is my honor to welcome you back to campus for VCU’s Spring 2026 semester as your interim executive vice president and provost. I hope the winter break gave each of you an opportunity to visit with family and friends and reflect on your successes and accomplishments from the past year.
This upcoming year offers us many opportunities to further those accomplishments, including our rising research rankings, while celebrating our faculty contributions to teaching and mentorship, as well as student success and enrollment growth.
To that note, we recently recognized over 30 faculty with VCU’s National/International Recognition Award (NIRA) and 26 faculty were recognized with the Excellence in Pedagogical Innovation Award (EPIA). Furthermore, over 530 VCU undergraduates will be presenting at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research, to be held in our own city of Richmond.
This semester, I hope we highlight how collaborations across different departments, schools and campuses, creates a vibrancy in the university greater than could be accomplished by the sum of all its individual parts. Collaborations are essential in answering the hard questions and in formulating yet even more important questions.
Ultimately, our work as educators, researchers and students, is to prepare for a life of service to others, a life guided by impact, and by solutions to problems that lead to the betterment of society and the human condition. Such impact should know no boundaries.
During my early undergraduate studies and after a visit to NASA, I was certain that my future would be in supporting space exploration by combining coding with fluid dynamics. My later years were influenced by newfound interest in theater arts. But, as so many of our faculty and students experience, a chance encounter turned my attention to a new career direction; for me, it was a visit to the Nobel Prize ceremony that set me on a path toward the life-changing power of research and clinical medicine.
A dermatologist and internist by trade and most-recently the dean of the VCU School of Medicine, my career has been defined by always putting the people we serve first. I will continue to do exactly this during my time as your interim provost by fostering a culture of care and support for every single one of our faculty, staff and students. But I will need your help in assuring that we are “striking the right chord.”
To our exceptional student body: I intend to spend the next semester connecting with as many of you as possible, to learn about your goals and career plans and to find ways that we can make your time at VCU as successful as possible. I want you to explore and savor the many resources available in our institution.
To our faculty and staff, I hope that this semester provides many opportunities for collaboration to continue to build upon the efforts of interim Provost Bev Warren and to find new paths for progress. Dr. Warren, thank you for leadership and guidance over the past year, you have once again made an indelible mark on this great university.
Thank you all for your commitment to this great university. Together, we will be unstoppable.
Art
Art Saavedra, M.D., Ph.D., MBA
Interim executive vice president and provost