As president of UMBC since August 2022, Valerie Sheares Ashby is inspired to lead the community toward a shared vision for its future, one in which UMBC realizes its ambition to “redefine excellence in higher education through an inclusive culture that connects innovative teaching and learning, research across disciplines, and civic engagement.”
Together with the entire UMBC community, Sheares Ashby is steadfastly focused on UMBC’s core purposes as a public research institution: to transform individual lives, to create knowledge and advance innovation, and to serve the state of Maryland and society broadly through its research, teaching, and community engagement.
Designated as a Research 1 institution in 2022—a classification that was reaffirmed in 2025—UMBC has continued to strengthen and grow its research enterprise under Sheares Ashby’s leadership. In Fiscal Year 2025, the university’s research expenditures reached an all-time high, exceeding $185 million. The university recently launched the Institute of Politics, building on research strengths in civic participation and democratic governance, and the Center for Ethics and Values, which hosts forums on ethical issues in contemporary society. UMBC’s Center for Artificial Intelligence (established in 2024), Cybersecurity Institute, and Quantum Science Institute are among the university’s growing investments in interdisciplinary scholarship addressing some of the most pressing questions in digital evolution and innovation and developing a workforce for the future. UMBC is celebrating its strengths in creative arts and research through a year-long Arts+ initiative in 2025-26.
In spring 2025, UMBC graduated its 100,000th student, and in the fall, it welcomed its largest-ever incoming class, with significant increases in transfer students and students from Baltimore City, thanks in part to new initiatives that offer guaranteed admission to more than 300 Baltimore City students each year and that provide additional financial support to Baltimore City students with family incomes of less than $80,000.
The sixth president of UMBC—and the first woman to serve in the role—Sheares Ashby holds a faculty appointment in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.
She joined UMBC after serving for seven years as dean of Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University. Her leadership at Duke followed 12 years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC)—her undergraduate and graduate alma mater—as a faculty member in the Department of Chemistry and its chair from 2012 to 2015.
She began her academic career in 1996 as an assistant professor of chemistry at Iowa State University and was promoted to associate professor in 2002 before returning to UNC (and her home state of North Carolina) in 2003.
Throughout her career, Sheares Ashby has consistently advanced diversity, equity, and inclusion as imperative to excellence in teaching and research. Her work to advance inclusive excellence includes serving as a mentor for the Iowa State University Program for Women in Science & Engineering and directing the UNC National Science Foundation Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate. She was instrumental in launching the Chancellor’s Science Scholars Program at UNC, which was one of the first replication programs by a research university of UMBC’s Meyerhoff Scholars Program.
EDUCATION
