About Sunil & Sumati

Dr. Sunil Kumar 

Dr. Sunil Kumar is the president of Tufts University and assumed office on July 1, 2023. He is the 14th president of Tufts and the first person of color to hold the office. He also serves as a tenured professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Tufts University’s School of Engineering.  

At Tufts, Kumar is strongly committed to preserving and enhancing the emphasis on a liberal arts undergraduate education within a tight-knit and student-centered environment while also enabling conditions that foster cutting-edge teaching and world-class research through Tufts’ many graduate and professional schools. To achieve these ends, he has introduced five broad pillars as strategic aspirations for Tufts in the near future: educate responsible leaders for the future, provide transformative student experiences, increase the university’s research footprint, broaden the definition of what it means to be a student, and give back to the community and society.  

Prior to Tufts, Kumar served as the 15th provost of Johns Hopkins University from 2016-2023 and as Dean of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, as well as the George Pratt Shultz Professor of Operations Management from 2011-2016. Before joining the Booth School of Business, he spent 14 years on the faculty of the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, where he was the Fred H. Merrill Professor of Operations, Information and Technology and served as the senior associate dean for academic affairs, overseeing the school’s MBA program and leading faculty groups in marketing and organizational behavior.  

Kumar’s research includes performance evaluation and control of manufacturing systems, service operations, and communications networks. In particular, he studies systems affected by stochastic variability via mathematical models. He also studies application of optimization methods and control theory to managerial problems.  

Born in India, Kumar received a Master of Engineering degree in computer science and automation from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India and a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Mangalore University in Surathkal, India. He earned a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  

Dr. Sumati Murli 

Dr. Sumati Murli is the Director for Clinical Research Administration in the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center (SKCCC) in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Dr. Murli holds a PhD in Biology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and has extensive experience in cancer research and drug development, in both academic and biopharmaceutical environments. Dr. Murli oversees clinical research operations in the SKCCC and is well versed in the processes of large non-profit research institutions.