Thulasi Kumar, former director of institutional research at the University of Northern Iowa, started work as director of institutional research and assessment at UMR on July 1.

“UMR plays a vital role in educating the scientists and engineers needed for the rapidly changing global economy,” says Kumar. “I am delighted to come to UMR at a historic time when the university is reshaping itself to be among the top technological research institutions in the nation. The challenge for institutional research is to provide policy, planning and decision support that will help to realign the institution as one of the nation’s premier technological universities.”

At UNI, Kumar was active in helping the university realign resources with changes in enrollment and declining state support. He also developed a campuswide data warehouse plan to integrate databases from numerous systems with a new enterprise planning system.

Kumar is the founder of the Iowa Association for Institutional Research. He serves on the executive board of the Data Mining in Higher Education Consortium and was the chair of the Practicing Institutional Research: Theory, Techniques, Technologies, Tools and Ethics track for the Association of Institutional Research Forum in 2007.