Announcing EVP and Provost Weaver

Dear LMU Community,

As we enter this new year together, I am grateful for the commitment and sense of shared purpose that sustain our community, and I hold renewed hope and excitement for the path ahead. In that spirit, I am pleased to announce that Professor Kathleen “Kat” Weaver, Ph.D., will serve as Loyola Marymount University’s next executive vice president and provost. After a comprehensive and highly competitive national search, and following careful consideration of the search committee’s recommendations and broad community input, I am confident that Kat is the right leader to guide and strengthen LMU’s academic life with the clarity, rigor, and care that define her leadership.

Provost Weaver is uniquely positioned for this moment in LMU’s life because she brings a rare combination of scholarly excellence, strategic imagination, and evidence-informed decision-making. Her leadership ensures that our students and faculty will continue to flourish in classrooms and studios, laboratories and libraries, clinics and performance spaces, and in every setting where our students encounter ideas that stretch them toward truth, purpose, and service. As a scholar-administrator deeply aligned with our mission and values, she has a proven record of strengthening faculty excellence and student success while building partnerships across disciplines in service of the common good.

Provost Weaver earned her Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from the University of Colorado Boulder and has published widely in her field, including research on land snails and freshwater fish that offers important insights into regional biodiversity, environmental change, and the factors that sustain healthy ecosystems. She is also a frequent author and presenter on STEM education and student learning, with a particular focus on gender equity, and she co-authored a statistics textbook designed to support hybrid learning. This scholarly grounding continues to inform her leadership and her commitment to academic rigor and innovation.

Since joining LMU in 2018, Provost Weaver has strengthened the conditions that enable our community to do its best work, grounded in the conviction that faculty and students thrive when support is holistic, mission-infused, and paired with thoughtful, well-researched decision-making. Those convictions have taken concrete form in outcomes that are measurable and meaningful. Among her many contributions, several stand out.

She has elevated LMU’s research and scholarly infrastructure in ways that expand opportunity and increase impact, including creating and teaching LMU’s Proposal Writing Academy (having served 148 participants and counting). Provost Weaver’s leadership has driven record external grant success with $23.1 million awarded in fiscal year 2025, a 250% increase since 2018, and a 300% increase in the number of project investigators submitting and receiving grants; strengthened institutional support for sponsored projects and research development that enables faculty scholarship and creative work to flourish; and grown LMU's financial commitment to research by 200% as reported by the National Science Foundation Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) rankings.
She has made faculty support more comprehensive, more relational, and more fully aligned with our mission, helping establish the Center for Faculty Development as a holistic professional-development home for tenure-line, term, and contingent faculty, while expanding mission-forward programming that supports teaching toward justice, Catholic Social Teaching, inclusive excellence, faculty learning communities, and leadership development across the university.
She has advanced student success and educational equity in ways that reflect our three sponsoring religious orders' commitments, serving as a key leader in the university’s designation as both a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) and an Asian American, Native American, and Pacific Islander Serving Institution (AANAPISI), guiding consensus-building and planning across divisions, and expanding high-impact student research opportunities that now engage more than 550 students annually with more than $1.3 million in awards each year.
She has led with steadiness in moments that demanded urgency, creativity, and care, directing Academic Affairs’ rapid transition to remote instruction during the pandemic, creating an eFaculty training program that supported more than 800 faculty members in successful online teaching, and strengthening online and hybrid programs in ways that remain academically rigorous, mission-aligned, and attentive to student learning.
She has strengthened LMU’s academic profile through partnership with LMU Loyola Law School, including leading the development of a fully in-house, high-quality hybrid Juris Doctor program that is now nationally ranked (currently ranked 6th nationally for its Hybrid JD and #1 evening program in the West), and expanding the Coelho Center for Disability Law, Policy, and Innovation from a school-based initiative into a university-wide enterprise that advances interdisciplinary scholarship, teaching, and public engagement.
She has played a pivotal role in securing significant university-level awards and externally funded initiatives that advance LMU’s mission and student support infrastructure, including the Delphi Award, multiple federally funded TRIO grants, a Title III-strengthening institutions grant, the Driving Change award from Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and support from the Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NETVUE), among others, demonstrating her ability to align competitive funding opportunities with institutional priorities and long-term impact.

Provost Weaver also leads in a way that is consonant with our mission. Through close partnership with our Mission Division, she has supported faculty formation and programming that ensure our academic mission is not only articulated but lived. She understands that our Catholic, Jesuit, and Marymount traditions call us to educate the whole person, and to do so in ways that widen access, elevate excellence, and form graduates who lead with courage and compassion.

Looking ahead, Provost Weaver’s vision is both ambitious and grounded. She is committed to advancing LMU’s priorities of academic excellence and innovation; mission, equity, and justice; and fiscal sustainability as mutually reinforcing commitments. In the months ahead, she will continue to lead with the spirit that has defined her service: collaborative, data-informed, transparent, and centered on what matters most: our students and the extraordinary people who teach, mentor, advise, and serve them.

I am grateful to the members of our provost search committee, chaired by Professor Mairead Sullivan, and to every member of our community who participated through feedback, listening sessions, and shared discernment. Your engagement reflects the seriousness of this leadership transition and the collective hope we hold for LMU’s next chapter.

Please join me in congratulating Provost Weaver as she assumes this role, and in offering her your partnership and support as we continue building a university that is mission-aligned, student-centered, and boldly committed to educational and scholarly excellence.

With gratitude,

Thomas Poon, Ph.D.
President and Professor of Chemistry