Beverly Davenport Sypher is Purdue’s associate provost for special initiatives. She is also the Susan Bulkeley Butler Chair for Leadership Excellence and Professor of Communication. Her primary responsibilities include faculty affairs, faculty development, internal and external reviews, administrative searches and other personnel matters related to faculty.  She serves as the provost's contact person for the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), the academic arm of the Big Ten Conference and as such is Purdue’s liaison to the CIC Academic Leadership Program. In addition to the CIC Fellows, Sypher also leads the Provost Fellows Program, the Department Head Leadership Program, and various initiatives for new, midcareer and senior faculty.

Sypher’s research on civil discourse grows out of long-standing interests in workplace communication and quality of work-life issues. In addition to numerous research articles and technical reports, she has published two books on the contemporary American workplace and is under contract for a third book entitled Destructive Organizational Communication. Sypher serves on the editorial boards of several journals, served as chair of the organizational communication division of the National Communication Association, and as a member of the board of directors for the International Communication Association. Her research also spans health and technology fields, including funded research for health-related entertainment education in the Peruvian Amazon and e-health and telehospice in the United States.

She has been the Principle Investigator (PI) or Co-PI for more than $18 million of external funding from the U.S. Department of Education and the National Science Foundation for innovations in learning and student success, especially for underrepresented students in STEM disciplines and learning-outcomes assessment in a variety of contexts. For two years, Sypher served as the director of the Discovery Learning Center at Purdue’s Discovery Park. She has won numerous awards for outstanding teaching both at the University of Kentucky where she was named a “UK Great Teacher,” the University’s highest teaching honor, and at the University of Kansas where she was named a prestigious Kemper Fellow for outstanding teaching. The National Communication Association also honored her with the Woolbert Award for outstanding teaching in the profession.
  
Sypher earned bachelor's degrees in communication and journalism from Western Kentucky University and a PhD from the University of Michigan. Before arriving at Purdue, she was a senior fellow in the Office of the Provost at Virginia Tech University, divisional dean for the social sciences at the University of Kansas, and chair of the Department of Communication at the University of Kentucky.