Securing Arizona's Future

Dear students and colleagues,

This spring, we launched a collaborative process around three strategic imperatives at the core of what we do as a university: providing our students the supportive environment, resources, and guidance they need to succeed on campus and beyond; pursuing research, creative activity, and scholarship of the highest caliber; and engaging with our local community, our state, our region, and the world through our mission as Arizona’s flagship, land-grant university.

The primary goal for this process is simple—to help our campus community align around a shared vision of who we are and what we can accomplish as an institution. Focusing on the future is particularly important in times of change, and by articulating a common understanding of what makes our university exceptional, we can continue to thrive as a force for good regardless of any challenges we face.

I want to thank everyone who has participated in the generative work to this point: academic and administrative leaders, faculty leaders, staff leaders, undergraduate and graduate students, shared governance groups, and community partners. The conversations have been uniformly energetic and inspiring, eliciting many enthusiastic and substantive contributions.

We will capture the essence of these conversations in a concise document and share it for comment with our campus community in the coming weeks. When completed, these strategic imperatives will serve as a rallying point and a framework guiding us into the future across all our efforts.

In parallel, we are pleased to announce a $20 million investment in areas of great strategic importance to our state and nation. These ambitious research initiatives that will positively impact our community include: advancing our leadership in space sciences, space technology, and our national security; safeguarding Arizona’s water and energy future through the commercialization of fusion energy; enhancing biomedical discovery and healthcare outcomes with artificial intelligence and machine learning; and modernizing mining for critical minerals, a foundational Arizona industry critical to many areas of our way of life. 

These areas of research align with the university’s institutional strengths, and the expertise needed for their success comes from a broad range of colleges and departments. The opportunity opened by this investment will be university-wide.

This work will build on recent transformational advances in technology and allow us to lead Arizona and our region into a position of global leadership for these key industries. We are grateful to the Arizona Board of Regents for their support of these initiatives through the recently approved $20 million from the state’s TRIF funds. This major investment will unleash innovation at the U of A, with direct impact on economic growth and workforce development, as well as long-term societal benefit at an even larger scale.

We also aim to surface exciting transdisciplinary faculty-led initiatives through the Office of Research and Innovation’s Big Idea Challenge. The U of A’s strengths are rooted in our faculty expertise, and this effort will help seed new ideas that could go on to attract significant additional public and private funding to solve some of the world’s biggest challenges.

With these and other efforts throughout our institution, the University of Arizona’s potential is unlimited. I am optimistic and confident about the days and years to come, both for our university community and for our critical role in securing Arizona’s future. I hope you share in the excitement, and I look forward to seeing what we will accomplish together.

With gratitude,
Suresh