Greetings From the Dean

INNOVATION LIVES at the core of a Tufts experience. In fact, our excellence in innovation was recently recognized when Tufts was accepted into the Association of American Universities (AAU), a consortium of America’s leading research universities known for education, research, and innovation. As a Tier 1 research university, Tufts is a national leader in providing opportunities for students to work alongside faculty across disciplines to create new knowledge, to probe, to problem solve, and to innovate.

Look no further than the Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, a home for entrepreneurial research, workshops, and accelerators that fuel innovative efforts across the curriculum. Or the Joyce Cummings Center, an eight-story academic building rising alongside the new public transit station connecting our Medford/Somerville campus with downtown Boston. The Cummings Center opens in January 2022 and will house computer science, economics, mathematics, and several more programs, allowing for new collaborations and innovative approaches across disciplines.

Faculty and staff at the Tufts Center for Engineering Education and Outreach at the School of Engineering are using a grant from the LEGO Foundation to develop the “Tech and Play” initiative—a collaborative initiative with organizations across the globe that will develop tools to support play in engineering, to provide professional development for teachers, and to continue innovating how we educate the next generation of engineers. And, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic required all of us to innovate how we learn, how we teach, and how we build community. At Tufts, that included designing and implementing health and safety protocols that supported an on-campus experience for most of our undergraduates for the 2020–2021 academic year, and creating novel ways to support athletics, student organizations, and social events.

This issue of JUMBO will give you a glimpse of our innovative spirit, and the ways in which this community navigates complex challenges. You will read about Professor Kareem Khubchandani who conducts innovative research into gender and sexuality, performance art and drag, and the South Asian diaspora. You will read about our students, including Parker Rule ’23, a mathematics and computer science double major who creates software that can run redistricting experiments, and Krithi Ram-Junnarkar ’22, a sociology major who looks for ways to create community on a campus full of passionate students from diverse backgrounds.

We close this issue by providing some insight into admissions and the experience of applying to Tufts. As a reminder, we are entering our second year of a three-year SAT/ACT test-optional pilot—we are giving you the choice of whether or not to submit SAT or ACT scores with your admissions application as we innovate our work in identifying the most talented, most compelling, and most promising students from across the country and around the world to join us on the Hill.

If our innovative, entrepreneurial, and collaborative community here at Tufts res onates with you, I look forward to getting to know you better through your application. I wish you all the best with your college search.

Best,

J.T. Duck's Signature

JT Duck Dean of Admissions