Preeti Sivasankar appointed vice president for research innovation
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Preeti Sivasankar has been appointed vice president for research innovation and will head the division of Strategic Interdisciplinary Research in the Office of Research, effective May 1.
“Preeti is a proven leader and administrator, having served as head of the highly ranked Purdue Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences as well as assistant vice president for strategic health research,” said Karen Plaut, executive vice president for research. “Now, at a time of significant growth in the Purdue research enterprise, her vision and leadership will be vital to supporting campus-wide funding and programmatic initiatives that facilitate collaborations across campus and increase the university’s competitiveness for extramural funding.”
Sivasankar joined Purdue University as an assistant professor in 2005 and was promoted to professor in 2014. She has led the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences since 2019, having served in an interim capacity in 2018. Under her leadership the department increased undergraduate and graduate student enrollment, enhanced the faculty-to-student ratio, substantively grew extramural research expenditures, boosted alumni engagement and fundraising, and improved U.S. News & World Report rankings, with both graduate programs — the master’s in speech-language pathology and the doctorate in audiology — ranked in the top 10 across the nation.
Sivasankar has received continual funding from the National Institutes of Health since 2008 for programmatic research on upper airway physiology. She is a fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, the American Laryngological Association and the National Academies of Practice.
The division of Strategic Interdisciplinary Research empowers Purdue investigators to sustain first-in-class strategic research programs that create new knowledge, transform established paradigms, generate revolutionary technologies and develop the next generation of inclusive research leaders.
Sivasankar will succeed Bryan Boudouris, associate vice president for strategic interdisciplinary research, who will become vice president for research and economic development at the University of Alabama.
“Bryan has been instrumental in shaping Purdue’s research goals and priorities through proposal development, long-range planning and facilitating large interdisciplinary proposals of strategic priority for external funding,” Plaut said. “Bryan has been a wonderful colleague, and on behalf of the entire research community at Purdue, I want to thank Bryan and wish him and his family well in this next chapter.”
About Purdue University
Purdue University is a public research institution demonstrating excellence at scale. Ranked among top 10 public universities and with two colleges in the top four in the United States, Purdue discovers and disseminates knowledge with a quality and at a scale second to none. More than 105,000 students study at Purdue across modalities and locations, including nearly 50,000 in person on the West Lafayette campus. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue’s main campus has frozen tuition 13 years in a row. See how Purdue never stops in the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap — including its first comprehensive urban campus in Indianapolis, the new Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. School of Business, and Purdue Computes — at https://www.purdue.edu/president/strategic-initiatives.
Writer/Media contact: Peter Shelby pwshelby@purdue.edu
Source: Preeti Sivasankar