Kimberly Andrews Espy, Ph.D.

As Senior Vice President leading the Office of Academic Affairs (OAA), Dr. Espy facilitates the development of timely and critical programming for the provosts and other university academic leaders of APLU institutions through the Council on Academic Affairs and supports member institutions to continually advance their academic enterprises through network convenings and innovative projects. The highly talented OAA staff work across a variety of issue areas, including data and policy analysis, student success and engagement, digital transformation, and STEM education.

Deep engagement with APLU on its councils, task forces and committees is a throughline across her varied experiences serving as the university president, provost, or vice president for research at several APLU member institutions. She most recently served as president of Wayne State University (WSU), where she led gains in the institution’s enrollment, retention, graduation, and research intensity, and secured record fundraising, industry engagement, and institutional ranking improvements. Prior to leading WSU, Dr. Espy served as provost and senior vice president of academic affairs at The University of Texas at San Antonio. In that role, she reorganized the university’s student success approach into a connected hub-and-spoke model, reoriented disparate programs to focus on career-engaged learning, established a new division to support faculty teaching innovation, centered student affairs on well-being, and elevated and embedded analytics to foster continual quality improvement. Working collaboratively across the institution to advance academic excellence, the university achieved the Carnegie R1 designation and earned the Seal of Excelencia, Excelencia in Education during her tenure.

Dr. Espy previously served as senior vice president for research at the University of Arizona where she focused on strategic research development for faculty individually and as a part of transdisciplinary teams. She spearheaded new university institutes that aligned with state and national priorities and engaged industry and the national laboratories, which resulted record awards. She also served as the Vice President for Research and Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Oregon and the Associate Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, after starting her academic faculty career at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine.

A translational neuroscientist, Dr. Espy is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences and of the American Psychological Association (D40). Her research, continuously funded from the NIH for more than 25 years, is focused on the development of executive control and its impacts on developmental, school, mental health and pediatric outcomes. She has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Rice University and a master’s and Ph.D. (clinical neuropsychology) from the University of Houston, and completed the clinical child/pediatric psychology internship at the University of Louisville School of Medicine and a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Arizona.