James Garrett

Jim Garrett became provost and chief academic officer of Carnegie Mellon University in January 2019. He is responsible for CMU's schools, colleges, institutes and campuses and is instrumental in institutional and academic planning and implementation. Garrett is committed to exploring and implementing innovations in education (especially related to modular education for residential and remote instruction), increasing access and affordability, ensuring student success, and building a diverse, equitable and inclusive community. Garrett is also a champion of sustainability, efficiency and effectiveness, overseeing a first-of-its-kind voluntary review of CMU’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2020.

Under his leadership as CMU dean of the College of Engineering from 2013 to 2019, the College issued a strategic plan in 2014 that outlined the five-year mission, vision and objectives for the trajectory of the College. The College also launched a comprehensive strategic plan for equity, diversity and inclusion that focused on the recruitment, inclusion and retention of underrepresented faculty and graduate students. This plan was executed over the next five years. On his watch, the College of Engineering climbed from a U.S. News & World Report (USNWR) Graduate School Rank of 7 to 4 and a USNWR Undergraduate Rank of 8 to 6.

Garrett engaged ANSYS, Inc. to support the creation of ANSYS Hall, a building in which students have space to design, simulate, build and test larger systems (a $25 million gift). While dean, the development and implementation of the Engineering Research Accelerator increased the College’s federal and industrial funding, boosted the number of interdisciplinary center-level proposals submitted and won, and diversified funding both in terms of source and size. In fiscal year 2017, the College experienced a marked increase in the number of multidisciplinary and multi-college proposals submitted and won $34 million worth of research center funding. During Garrett’s tenure as Dean, the CMU Africa campus in Kigali, Rwanda, which the College of Engineering founded and manages, continued to excel and today is a healthy and thriving academic endeavor with more than 40 faculty and about 300 MS students from over 20 African countries. It receives significant support from the Government of Rwanda and the Mastercard Foundation.