Director, The ByWater Institute

Director

The ByWater Institute

NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA

The Search

Tulane University, one of the nation’s most prestigious research institutions, seeks a visionary leader and scholar to serve as Director of the ByWater Institute. The mission of the ByWater Institute is to advance applied, interdisciplinary research and community engagement initiatives around coastal resilience and the urban environment. Tulane seeks a Director who will harness the Institute’s assets to create a vision that maintains its core mission while keeping pace with the needs of an evolving, world-class University, a thriving coastal city, and a world increasingly affected by the issues this Institute was created to address.

With 8,339 undergraduate and 5,110 graduate students in the schools of architecture, business, law, liberal arts, medicine, public health and tropical medicine, the sciences and engineering, and social work, Tulane is known for its highly collaborative environment with innovative interdisciplinary research and educational programs. The University has cultivated an emphasis on community service and practical experience that infuses its programs, culture, and community. Students are proud to take part in community-engaged research in all disciplines and contribute thousands of hours of public service to the greater New Orleans community each year. Following a decade of rebuilding and renewal after Hurricane Katrina, the University is operating on a balanced budget and has steadily increased its admissions selectivity, ranking, and student diversity. Tulane is in a strong position to realize an exciting next chapter under the leadership of its 15^th president, Michael Fitts.

The ByWater Institute works with partners across Tulane and the globe to deliver engaged scholarship on energy, environment, and resilience. In the face of climate change and sea level rise, coastal regions in the Gulf South and throughout the world face challenges including infrastructure decline, human migration, tropical diseases, and ecological disturbance. Tulane is uniquely positioned to generate high impact research to support coastal communities in adapting and responding to environmental change. Building on more than 30 years of work at the Tulane-Xavier Center for Bioenvironmental Research, the ByWater Institute and its partners take advantage of the natural laboratory of New Orleans and the Lower Mississippi Delta region to address questions of global importance with an emphasis on achieving a sustainable balance between natural and human systems. The Institute’s interdisciplinary mission and assets are a point of pride throughout the University and feature prominently in Tulane’s $1.3 billion capital campaign, “Only the Audacious.”

As an academic center under the Office of Research at Tulane, the ByWater Institute conducts and facilitates research, education, and outreach through cross-disciplinary partnerships and collaborations. Reporting directly to the University’s vice president for research, the Director is a member of the academic leadership team and collaborates closely with the deans of Tulane’s schools and colleges to assist in making strategic faculty hires bolstering interdisciplinary research and programs. The new Director will leverage the Institute’s many assets, including unparalleled research and educational facilities along the Mississippi River in downtown New Orleans and Carmichael Forest, for sustained growth and innovation. The Institute’s leader will put forth a vision that preserves the advances made over the past 30 years while boldly embracing the future, including opportunities to attract new resources to the ByWater Institute through research funding and philanthropy. The Director will receive a faculty position in the academic department of best fit at Tulane. Candidates must have an earned doctorate or terminal degree in a discipline relevant to the Institute and a strong record of scholarship, as evidenced by tenure in their field. 

Tulane has retained Isaacson, Miller, a national executive search firm, to assist in the recruitment of the Director of the ByWater Institute. All inquiries, nominations, and applications may be submitted at: www.imsearch.com/7393 

Tulane is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer and actively works to enhance its diversity.