Office of the Provost and Executive Vice President

2024-2025 Provost Lecture Series

Raison D’être of Higher Education: Student Success

Tuesday, April 1, 2025Sonny Ramaswamy
10:00-11:00 am
Banquet rooms A&D
Main floor, Alumni Center

Dr. Sonny Ramaswamy
Retired President, Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities

Biographical Sketch

Dr. Ramaswamy served as President of the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities (NWCCU) from 2018-2025. NWCCU is recognized by the US Department of Education to accredit colleges and universities in the United States. Under his leadership, NWCCU articulated the vision to be the premier accreditation agency, whose member institutions foster access, belonging, and success for every student, which has been critical to NWCCU’s national recognition as an innovative accreditor, laser focused on student success and closing achievement gaps.

Sonny was appointed in 2012 by President Barack Obama to a six-year term as Director of USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which catalyzes transformative discoveries, education, and engagement to solve societal challenges. With the vision of “User Inspired Science to Transform Lives,” he provided strategic direction for broad, national policies to develop, execute, and deploy cutting edge science with over $1.5 billion in Federal funding to address challenges in food and agricultural systems. He helped synergize interagency and international partnerships to address food and nutrition security in the areas of food, farming systems, including vertical and controlled environment agriculture, nanotechnology, robotics, drones, Big Data, AI, cyber-physical systems, public health and nutrition, energy, earth systems, water, climate science, social sciences, youth and family issues, and military and Veterans issues.

Previously, Dr. Ramaswamy served as dean of Oregon State University’s College of Agricultural Sciences, director of Purdue’s Agricultural Research Programs, university distinguished professor and head of entomology at Kansas State University, and professor of entomology at Mississippi State University. Sonny’s BSc (Agriculture) and MSc (Entomology) are from the University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore, India; his PhD (Entomology) is from Rutgers. He did postdoctoral research at Michigan State University.