Fall 2023 Welcome

Dear members of the Dartmouth community,

It has given me particular joy over the past few weeks to watch this community come together on campus—our professional and graduate students, our undergraduates, our faculty, and our staff. Many of you were here over the summer, and more still are returning to begin a fresh academic year.

I want to give a special greeting to those of you who, like me, are relative newcomers: I hope you, too, are enjoying the warm welcome I have received into this extended, global, Dartmouth family, and I hope you share in the excitement I feel as we come together in this singular place. That energy was palpable last week as the undergraduate Class of 2027 and their families and friends gathered on Memorial Field to begin a new tradition celebrating the students' full membership in this storied community.

As many of you know, this past year I've had hundreds of conversations and meetings to help me better understand Dartmouth's distinctive strengths and how we can aspire to even greater heights. From this wide-ranging listening and learning tour, and intensive work with senior leaders across campus, it is clear to me that we have one of the best undergraduate programs in the world and a university ecosystem that generates knowledge and expertise of global importance that allows us to prepare brave leaders with the heart, mind, and skill to change the world. 

I will discuss my  observations in greater detail at my inauguration on Sept. 22 and how, together, we can realize our goals and aspirations. I hope you can join us for this ceremony and community cookout, which will celebrate Dartmouth, all it has contributed over two and a half centuries, all it has to offer the world now, and all of you who make it possible.

Before we look at the trajectory of the institution as a whole, I want to highlight one priority that so many of you—students in particular—have collectively called out and one that means a great deal to me personally: the health and well-being of every one of you, and of our entire community. My work as a cognitive scientist has focused on high-performing individuals and teams, and so I understand in a particular way how important this foundation of well-being is to our community members and to Dartmouth's ability to fulfill its mission and its potential. 

For that reason, we have begun a national search for Dartmouth's first chief health and wellness officer, who will report to me, coordinating and expanding the good work so many of you are doing to help this community thrive. I also want to invite every member of our community to join us either in person or virtually at a landmark event on Sept. 28 convening an extremely rare gathering of the current U.S. Surgeon General and his six living predecessors to discuss and seek solutions to our national mental health crisis. This is one important way Dartmouth can lead, applying our resources and expertise to the most important challenges facing our society and our nation.

Our faculty have already built an essential foundation for this work through research such as Andrew Campbell's StudentLife study using sensing data from phones to and wearables to assess mental health; Lisa Marsch's work directing the Center for Technology and Behavioral Health, which has team members based at institutions across the country; and Janice McCabe's exploration of the importance of friendship networks and the role they play in academic success. These contributions remind us of all Dartmouth has to offer. As we embark on this new academic year, I wish you the best in your studies, your teaching, your scholarship, and your development in a thousand other pursuits and avocations. Most of all, I look forward to our collective growth as a community that lives, learns, and leads together, to the benefit of the world around us.

With best wishes,

Sian Leah Beilock
President