From the President

Dear alumni, friends and supporters of USF,

Since I returned in February as USF’s ninth president, I have received wonderful messages from many alumni welcoming me home. Tampa truly is home for me and my family — the 10 years I lived here when I served as dean of USF’s Muma College of Business marked the longest I had lived anywhere.

As you will read in the cover story, that experience has helped to shorten my learning curve. But USF is not the same institution that I left in 2022. From day one, I have focused on listening and reconnecting with faculty, staff, alumni, and community and civic leaders as we look to write the next chapter for our university. My listening tour has included town hall meetings on each of our campuses and visits to all our colleges. It is already shaping what comes next: a strategic plan grounded in a compelling vision and bold goals to sustain and accelerate our remarkable trajectory.

This is a time of profound change in higher education, and incremental improvement will not be sufficient. If universities simply continue doing what they have always done, they will become indistinguishable from one another.

We choose a different path, one that strengthens our research engine and positions USF as one of the nation’s most innovative metropolitan research universities. I see USF moving from being a rookie member of the Association of American Universities to a model AAU institution in an era of artificial intelligence and intelligent systems.

Throughout my listening tour, I have been so impressed with the incredible optimism across our campuses and throughout the community for the future of our great university that we are building together. I am honored to once again be part of the USF community. Thank you for all you do for our students and our university.

Moez Limayem, PhD
President, University of South Florida