Interim leader Jarrell chosen as UMB president

Dr. Bruce Jarrell, who has been serving as interim leader of the University of Maryland, Baltimore, has been chosen as the school’s next president.

The University System of Maryland Board of Regents made the announcement Thursday morning. Jarrell, who has been interim president of the university since Jan. 6, assumes the job effective Sept. 11.

Jarrell joined UMB in 1997 to lead the Department of Surgery. He was appointed chief academic and research officer in 2012 and provost in 2017.

“He has already served the university so well in leading its academic and research offices, and his effective stewardship as interim president was seamless during an important and transitional time for the USM,” said USM Board Chair Linda R. Gooden. “Dr. Jarrell has been a critical part of the System’s planning and response to the COVID-19 pandemic this year, and we are delighted that he will remain in this key leadership role at UMB.”

Perman called the Jarrell the “ideal leader for UMB,” adding, “Bruce will be the kind of leader who brings out the best in the people who now surround him. His deep capability and dynamic vision are exactly what an institution as important as UMB needs and deserves.”

Jarrell was born and raised in Caroline County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. He received a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Delaware and an MD degree from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia.

He completed a general surgical residency and renal transplantation fellowship at the Medical College of Virginia and has held faculty positions at Jefferson and the University of Arizona, where he was professor and chair of surgery just before coming home to Maryland in 1997.

“The core of my professional life is centered here at UMB,” Jarrell said. “I have been so proud to guide the university during these months of staggering challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic, with UMB on the forefront of medical and societal advances.”

UMB is the state’s public health, law, and human services university devoted to professional, graduate, and undergraduate education, research, patient care, and public service.  The university enrolls more than 6,800 students in six professional schools — dentistry, law, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and social work — and an interdisciplinary graduate school.

The university offers 76 doctoral, master’s, baccalaureate, and certificate programs, and confers most of the professional practice doctoral degrees awarded in Maryland.

The school also has been a prime presence in revitalization efforts on the city’s west side, particularly with the presence of its BioPark biomedical research center.