Kumble Subbaswamy

Biography

Kumble R. Subbaswamy is the University of Massachusetts Interim Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, Student Affairs and Equity, serving the five-campus, 74,000-student system. He previously served as the Chancellor of UMass Amherst for 11 years.

Subbaswamy’s pursuit of academic excellence; promotion of research and outreach; and initiatives aimed at addressing campus climate, diversity, and culture have positioned him as highly regarded not only at the University of Massachusetts but nationally.

A physicist by training, and an elected Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Subbaswamy has spent almost his entire professional life at public research universities. Before coming to the University of Massachusetts, he served as provost at the University of Kentucky since 2006. He joined the faculty at Kentucky in 1978, after serving as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, Irvine. During his first 18 years at the University of Kentucky, he served as associate dean of arts and sciences and as chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

In other administrative positions, Subbaswamy was also dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Miami from 1997 to 2000. He left to become dean of arts and sciences at Indiana University Bloomington, serving until 2006 when he moved to Kentucky. A native of India, he holds a bachelor’s degree in science from Bangalore University, a master’s in physics from Delhi University, and a PhD in physics from Indiana University. He was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 1989. His primary research area is the optical properties of novel materials and nonlinear excitations. He has published more than 60 articles and coauthored a book on the local density theory of polarizability.