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In June 2026, Suzanne Barbour, Ph.D., was appointed to a second five-year term as Dean of The Graduate School and Vice Provost for Graduate Education. First appointed in 2022, Dean Barbour has skillfully led graduate programming at Duke during a time of evolution and change in higher education.
Reflecting on her previous term and mapping the next, Dean Barbour shares how a people-first, values-driven mindset has anchored her approach to leadership. Central to her mission is providing a holistic educational experience that transcends discipline-specific training to include mentorship, belonging, professional development, and wellness support as integral to student success.
Dean Barbour's second term will begin in September 2027.
When you first joined us at Duke, you said that leading a graduate school gave you the opportunity to positively affect students across many disciplines, and through them, future generations. Four years into your time here, when have you felt that sense of purpose most strongly?
I think I felt it most strongly over the last 18 months or so when there have been so many changes happening in higher ed. And part of our challenge has been to try and keep the experience that students have here at Duke as constant and normal as we possibly can. When I say “we,” I mean the whole graduate education community: The Graduate School, the graduate programs, directors of graduate studies, and faculty who work with students.
We're all concerned about what the future holds, but this is not the time to retreat. I have to say that the team here at Duke has been absolutely amazing in their resilience and their ability to look past all that and see through to our core mission, which is ensuring that students get the best possible research-driven graduate education they can get. The team has been successful in achieving that.
When you arrived at Duke in 2022, you described your early agenda as a work in progress that would be shaped by listening. What did you hear during those first years that most changed your thinking?
What I heard from students was that they wanted to be more effective in their relationships with each other, with faculty, and with mentors. What I heard from faculty was they wanted to be more effective mentors to their students, but didn't necessarily know how to do it. Mentoring is a cornerstone; it's absolutely key. Even the most outstanding student is not going to get the most out of their degree if they don't have solid mentoring. I knew that already before I came to Duke, but hearing from students and faculty made it clear that we needed to really double down on mentoring, mentor preparation, and helping students to understand that they have responsibilities in the mentoring relationship too.
Two important things have happened there. One of them is the partnership we have with the Office of Faculty Advancement that has given us access to Maria Wisdom and her expertise and her time. She comes at it from the point of view of a mentor and a coach and thinks about how to empower people. That's been incredibly helpful to us, and she and Associate Dean Yan Li are doing some nice work on looking at mentoring through kind of a human lens and training faculty in the art and science of mentoring. They'll be extending that to students this fall.
We also did a refresh of the Core Expectations for Graduate Education. These expectations outline expectations for students, faculty, programs, and The Graduate School to ensure we deliver the best research-driven graduate education. We were really lucky to recruit a graduate faculty fellow, Lauren Ginsberg, who led the Executive Committee of Graduate Faculty in an exploration of the old document and development of a new one that really makes mentoring and relationships a cornerstone of the expectations we have.
As a follow-up to that, you became the PI for the University Center of Exemplary Mentoring, which, despite its name, focuses on a bit more than mentoring. Could you talk about your role briefly with that center, and what do you see happening with it next?
You know, that's an incredibly important tool we have that addresses a concept that we've been talking about since I got here, and that's the idea of holistic graduate education. Students come to Duke to train in a discipline, work with particular faculty, and access resources that prepare them for their chosen career path.
That said, even the best student is not going to get the most they can out of their degree if all they get is discipline-specific training. So, The Graduate School is here to provide wraparound support for our students to ensure they can focus on their disciplinary training and get the most out of it. It includes preparation for being a good mentee and for their advisors, it means mentor training for faculty. It includes professional and career development, something we've really been focusing on, especially this summer, and we hope to roll out some things that I think will be even more helpful to students in the near future. It focuses on wellness and ensuring students not only have access to resources to help them when they fall into a place where they're not well, either physically or mentally, but that they have strategies that help them stay well. Graduate school is hard, and it's important that we have resources to help students be all the best that they can be.
A lot of that kind of support comes from The Graduate School, and the UCEM is a pilot that has allowed us to develop some of that programming. We’ve been very lucky to have a grant from the Sloan Foundation to support UCEM. Because the money came from a sponsor, we were only able to serve a subset of students, but our goal now is to go beyond just that small group of students and ensure that this kind of holistic graduate education support is available to all students in our school.
You began your career as a laboratory scientist, and you're still a scientist now. Does the scientist in you influence how you approach institutional change, perhaps by forming hypotheses, testing ideas, revising them?
Well, that is exactly the scientific process, and I'd say that that's the way my mind works. Being a scientist makes me very data-driven, but one of the downsides is I tend to focus on quantitative data and not qualitative data. Being in this role has helped me to appreciate the value and importance of qualitative data.
Leveraging data to form hypotheses, leveraging data to drive those hypotheses forward by developing pilots and testing ideas and revising them, that's at the core of what I do and the way that my mind works. What I've learned in these roles that complements my career as a laboratory scientist is the people side of things. I've learned to appreciate the value that qualitative and relational data bring as well, so that we can leverage both the quantitative and the qualitative to make good decisions, I hope, about graduate education.
You often say, “When you've seen one graduate school, you've seen one.” You've now led graduate schools at three universities. What has Duke taught you about graduate education that you could not have learned elsewhere?
That is such a great question. Well, Duke is the first private school where I’ve been, and here we have different constraints than you have at the state level. And you don't have the same kind of advocates you have at the state level either. The advocacy role is quite different at Duke than it is at a state institution.
I think the other thing I'd say is that Duke is an elite institution. People come here from all over the world, and Duke is where we’ve really arrived in terms of research. We’re educating incredible young people who are brilliant and come here already incredibly accomplished—really just looking for us to help them get to that next level so they can go out and do amazing things. That's been just a tremendous honor and a huge learning experience for me.
Duke has expanded interdisciplinary graduate training, including through the IGECs, the Interdisciplinary Graduate Education Collaboratives. What can interdisciplinary education offer students that a traditional program structure cannot, and what should institutions be careful not to lose in that process?
I especially appreciate this question. Duke is known as a place that promotes interdisciplinary research. And in fact, the Times Higher Ed global rankings had us tied for number six in interdisciplinary science last year. This is something we do really, really well, but we still tend to do it in some fairly defined boxes. What the IGECs do is provide a flexible template that allows us to assemble teams of students and faculty around ideas, questions, and problems they want to solve. Maybe they have a seminar; maybe there’s outreach in the community; maybe there are courses or a journal club. There's a certificate associated with each of our IGECs that students can earn to document their interdisciplinary training.
As long as there's a need for that kind of collaboration, the IGEC faculty and students stay connected. If those problems are solved and new ones emerge, the model allows us to disassemble the old and stand up another IGEC. The IGECs are meant to be timely, they're meant to be responsive. They're meant to bring people together, students and faculty and staff across the university, who are all interested in a particular question or problem, but might not otherwise find each other.
I'm really excited that the first three are launching this fall and can’t wait to see what comes from them. We’ll learn a lot from this pilot and are very lucky to have money from the Duke Endowment to do it. I'm enthusiastic about how we disseminate this and scale it.
"We’re going to have to be even more intentional about holistic graduate education...we have to prepare [students] for the real world they're going to face when they leave here."
Dean Suzanne Barbour
How do you preserve empathy and a student-centered perspective when the realities of budgets, regulations, or national policy constrain the choices available to you?
I guess you just stay focused on your core mission. It's not our students' fault that sometimes it feels that the world is crumbling around us right now. It's not their fault that certain things are on fire. It's not their fault that the world we thought we were creating for them may or may not exist anymore.
But there's still these incredibly brilliant young scholars who come here because they trust us to take them along for the next mile. It's what they deserve. It's what we owe to them. We may have to put aside our worries during the day and commit to not letting it get in the way of us continuing to deliver on our mission.
The Graduate School is in the process of revising its mission and strategic plan. What's top of mind in revising that mission? What's the central question that you're trying to explore?
I think the main question is how we ensure that we continue to deliver an outstanding research-driven graduate education under the new constraints that we face. The previous strategic plan was a 10-year plan developed in 2016, before the world began changing as rapidly as it has. We now know that foundational new discoveries like AI have become a reality, and it’s going to change the way we train our students. The world will change very quickly as a result of it. Our strategic plan has to be flexible to allow for that.
We know that the relationship between universities and the government is changing, and the resources we have to support our students is changing, and we're going to have to respond to that as well.
What this means is we will have to build new partnerships that we might not have thought about. We're going to lean more heavily on external partnerships and opportunities for our students to see what it's like to be in roles outside of academia. We're going to have to be more intentional about how we structure our internal workings within The Graduate School.
We’re going to have to be even more intentional about holistic graduate education. We're not the only ones who are feeling the slings and arrows of what's happening around the world right now. Our students feel it too. We need to provide them with a bit of a protective bubble so they can focus in on that research, on the scholarship, on getting their degrees, but at the same time, we have to prepare them for the real world they're going to face when they leave here.
The last thing I would say is that Duke, like a lot of institutions, is a fairly siloed place. We have our little silo in The Graduate School, in the other schools and offices around campus. We have to break down those silos, too, and support and help each other even more than we have in the past. This is a time when bringing folks together and looking for common solutions that are going to help everybody, on all boats, rise together is more important than before.
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What are you prepared to do differently in your second term, based on some things that you learned or things that have changed? What do you want to see happen differently than the first five years?
In addition to being dean of The Graduate School, I’m also vice provost for graduate education, and I want to build stronger connections across graduate education at Duke. In my second term, I want to have some platforms that will allow me as a leader to interact with folks who are managing the non-research-based graduate programs. There are some commonalities between our programming where I can potentially be helpful. In a time of a lot of change and challenge, just having the opportunity to share concerns and strategies offers potential that we can benefit on both sides of the equation. There may also be opportunities to get feedback on the impact of our programming, because we don't evaluate the enterprise as often as we should. The Graduate School made a substantial investment to evaluate our programming through the Council of Graduate Schools this year, and we got a lot of really good information back from that. We don't have to do something on that scale every year, but having the opportunity to collect more feedback regularly would be very helpful to us.
I'd also say that we as a team in The Graduate School are a fairly cohesive team. We're a strong team, but there’s a lot of change happening, and I'd like for us to build more opportunities for our team to get together, such as the brown bag lunches started this summer by Assistant Dean Courtnea Rainey and Senior Program Coordinator Leo Biggs, which give staff a platform to share their expertise and learned skills with one another. I'd like to leverage models like that which don't require a big investment on team members' parts, but do give them the opportunity to come together and share and learn from each other.
Your work is obviously incredibly challenging and rewarding. What have you found personally to keep yourself grounded and present in your own life and in the work that you do?
I would say it's probably my little puppies and my cats. I have two dogs and three cats at home, and when I come home from a rough day, which happens, I pull my car in the garage and when I open the door and I see these little furry faces there, that don't know that I had a rough day. They're wagging their tails and knocking stuff over until I get in the house and see what they've destroyed that day.
It's just a joy to see them and their happiness, and that gives me joy and makes me want to get up the next morning. And if for nothing else, I have to go out and make money so I can feed them.
Suzanne Barbour Reappointed Dean of the Graduate School and Vice Provost for Graduate Education
"Over the last four years, Suzanne Barbour has helped Duke navigate a rapidly changing landscape for graduate education through her caring, collaborative, and forward-looking leadership,” said Provost Alec Gallimore.