Ayanna Thomas, professor of psychology and dean of research for the School of Arts and Sciences, has been named as the new dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She took up her new post on February 1.
“Ayanna has been an invaluable colleague as dean of research,” says Bárbara Brizuela, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences. “I know she will bring the same creativity, rigor, and vision to this new role, and I am so thankful that she has embraced this new challenge. I can’t wait to see everything she will accomplish for graduate education in Arts & Sciences.”
Thomas investigates interactions between memory and metamemory—the knowledge and awareness of our own memory processes—to better understand the role metamemory plays in memory acquisition, distortion, and access. She examines these questions with basic research and applied approaches as they relate to education, eyewitness memory, and age-related changes in memory.
Her recent research has focused on how these interactions plays out in the classroom, including “how students perform, how they study, how they access that information, and whether factors are external to cognitive engagement influence their performance,” she says, such as anxiety and stress.
In fall 2021, she became dean of research for the School of Arts and Sciences, a role previously held by the dean of the graduate school. Coming out of the pandemic, it was clear that there needed to be more focused attention on research, she says.
As dean of research, one of her goals that first year was to help facilitate and support faculty research and scholarship, including managing research administration, dealing with compliance, and designing new ways to support faculty research and scholarship. She also created new kinds of research funding mechanisms, such as the annual Dean’s Research Fellowship. In addition, her office runs regular research-based workshops for faculty.
“We also think about strategic hiring—how we can build our research and scholarship footprint by bringing in faculty who not only are excellent in their own right, but add to our current and future strengths,” she says. “We are strategically hiring in spaces like human health and AI and AI support, for example.”
Thomas is eager for the challenges in her new position. “It’s a critical time for graduate education at Tufts and across the United States,” she says. “I think we as academic leaders have to really think about the future of both undergraduate and graduate education. I think that this is a puzzle and a problem that can be approached and effectively solved with the team here at Tufts.”
Graduate education needs to move toward more interdisciplinarity, she says, “thinking about training not from the perspective of one individual program, one individual department, but about the expertise that we have as a community, not only in arts and sciences but across the university, to help students and trainees adapt to the way jobs are going to unfold.”
Flexibility in how graduate education is offered is also important, Thomas says. “That means thinking about what it means to have more online learning, such as low-residency programs that don’t force individuals to relocate to engage effectively with their training,” she says. “I think it’s clear that we have the capacity to do that, which might better meet the needs of students.”
In addition to her teaching, research, and administrative work, Thomas has been a participating faculty member with the Visiting and Early Scholars’ Research Experiences program since its inception in 2018; it serves students who may not have had research opportunities before.
Thomas received a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Washington. Prior to coming to Tufts in 2007, she taught at Colby College and worked as a researcher and postdoctoral scholar at Washington University.
