Dr. Kimberly Andrews Espy to Serve as APLU’s Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs Starting August 3

APLU is delighted to announce that Dr. Kimberly Andrews Espy will serve as APLU’s Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs effective August 3, 2026.

Dr. Espy brings an extraordinary breadth and depth of experience to the new role, having served as a university president, a provost, and vice president for research at several APLU member institutions. Deep engagement with APLU has been a throughline across her varied roles. She has been a member of APLU’s Council of Presidents and Council on Academic Affairs and served for several years on the Council on Research Executive Committee, as well serving on task forces, program committees and panels.

She most recently served as president of Wayne State University (WSU), where she led the university to new heights during her tenure. Under her leadership, the university launched the WSU Prosperity Agenda – advancing social mobility, urban health, and regional innovation to enhance community impact as a “University of Opportunity.” She also shepherded critical 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 the Division of Academic Innovation to support faculty teaching innovation, digital transformation, and engaged STEM learning, centered the Division of Student Affairs on student 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 from 2014 to 2018. With a focus on research development for faculty individually and as a part of transdisciplinary teams, the university doubled its new NIH awards and increased overall federal grant award to record totals. She also spearheaded new university institutes that aligned with state and national priorities and engaged industry and the national laboratories. 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.

As SVP for Academic Affairs at APLU, Dr. Espy will facilitate the development of timely and critical programming for the provosts of APLU institutions through the Council on Academic Affairs and lead APLU’s Office of Academic Affairs (OAA) in supporting member institutions to continually advance their academic enterprises and be in charge of programming for provosts and university academic leaders. OAA currently has 11 highly talented full-time employees working across a variety of issue areas, including data and policy analysis, digital transformation for student success, student affairs, and STEM education.

A translational neuroscientist, Dr. Espy is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences and of the Division of Clinical Neuropsychology, American Psychological Association. 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.