> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://circuitpress.org/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Q&A with the Senior Vice Provost of Purdue in Indianapolis - URL: https://circuitpress.org/david-umulis-interview/ - Published: 2026-09-23T01:30:45.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-23T13:45:57.000Z - Description: We had the opportunity to interview Senior Vice Provost of Purdue in Indianapolis, David Umulis. Hear what his role is, what's new on campus, and what he's learned in the first two years of running the Indy location. - Author: Alicia Munch - Tags: News Watch our interview on Youtube *Published at 9:30pm ET on September 22\. Last updated: 9:45am on September 23 to include the interview transcript.* *The interview was recorded on September 11.* While Purdue in Indianapolis is an extension campus with most of its academic leadership based in West Lafayette, there is an administrative team focused specifically on the needs of the Indianapolis location. Leading this team is David Umulis, the Senior Vice Provost and Chief Academic Officer for Purdue in Indianapolis. We had the opportunity to interview him, and wanted to learn more about what’s new this semester, what he’s learned in the first couple years of leading the campus, and what he’s excited about for its future. In our interview, Umulis listed some planned or new programs, spaces, and opportunities that he’s excited about for the year: - [Academic Success Building](https://www.purdue.edu/indianapolis/asb/?ref=circuitpress.org): “less than 10 months away from the new building opening”. - [3rd Annual Purdue + Google AI Summit](https://www.purdue.edu/events/ai-summit/?ref=circuitpress.org) in Indianapolis, taking place in October. - Purdue is sponsoring the [2026 BioCrossroads Life Sciences Summit](https://biocrossroads.com/events/2026-biocrossroads-life-sciences-summit/?ref=circuitpress.org): Also taking place in October, with companies like Eli Lilly participating. - [Smart Center](https://www.purdue.edu/science/student-experience/smart-center.html?ref=circuitpress.org): A new academic support center from the College of Science, offering help in physics, chemistry, math, statistics, and computer science courses. - Kurt Vonnegut Museum: [Purdue has acquired the building which houses the museum](https://www.vonnegutlibrary.org/2026/08/a-new-chapter-for-kvml-our-expanded-partnership-with-purdue-university/?ref=circuitpress.org), which now offers Purdue hours extending into the evening. - Additional bus routes have been added for evening football games, along with [a new campus transit to 16 Tech and Dallara](https://www.purdue.edu/operations/campus-mobility/home/campus-transit/indianapolis/?ref=circuitpress.org). - Purdue is working with organizations such as the Indy Chamber to try and make more Indianapolis city events and experiences affordable for students. - New [ECE Gaming concentration which will include participation in Xbox Game Camp](https://engineering.purdue.edu/ECE/News/2026/purdue-ece-launches-game-development-and-design-concentration-in-indianapolis-with-xbox-game-camp?ref=circuitpress.org). - Canal Square and Purdue Canal Park: Students now have access to additional classrooms and reserve-able space along the canal for activities and events. - [Indianapolis Explorers Club](https://www.purdue.edu/indianapolis/indianapolis-explorers-club-will-cultivate-research-path-and-community-for-undergrads/?ref=circuitpress.org): A course and financial support program, which launched this semester, designed to give students research experiences in Indianapolis. - [Trailblazer Fund](https://www.purdue.edu/vpsl/news/featured-stories/2026%5F04%5Fstudent-orgs-forging-ahead-trailblazer-fund.php?ref=circuitpress.org): Program to provide funding to student organizations is continuing after its launch last year. - Industry connections: Companies coming to campus for career visits, mixers, and other opportunities, including Honda and Cummins, following a recent visit from Rolls-Royce. We also asked Umulis if he is concerned about the dropping new student enrollment for Indy over the past two years, and while he attributed the drop in Computer Science to national factors related to AI, the same drop was not seen in West Lafayette which had an increase in new student enrollment for Computer Science Department majors this year compared to last year. Additionally, new student enrollment dropped for Mechanical Engineering in Indianapolis year-over-year both this year and in Fall 2025\. Only Motorsports Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Animation and Visual Effects saw increased new student enrollment in Indy compared to last year. Watch the video to hear more, or read the transcript below which has been lightly edited for length and clarity: **For those who don't know you, could you briefly explain what your role is at the Purdue Indianapolis campus?** Yeah, thank you. Thanks for this chance to talk and meet and get a chance to answer some questions. So I'm David Umulis. I've been at Purdue for 18 years. And before taking on this role, for Purdue to support Indianapolis in the provost office, I am a faculty member in biomedical engineering. I was the former department head for the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering. And during that time, cultivated a lot of relationships with companies and with medical clinical systems in Indianapolis, all of the hospitals and other places in that space. And so when this new direction for Indianapolis was launched, as you've been a part of for a very long time, I joined with the Provost. So I am the Chief Academic Officer, but as an expansion, you know, and an integrated part of Purdue University, there's only one President, there's only one Provost. A Provost is the person who oversees the academic operations of the university. And I'm a Vice Provost in his staff to support the launch and the operation and the building of new programs and to grow the ecosystem in Indianapolis. And so my role is to bridge West Lafayette and Indianapolis to work closely with the provost and other university leaders to build more opportunities, more programs, more courses for the campus, and to work on greater connectivity. I like to think about it as two parts of Purdue's famous cheer. You know, we have “Boiler Up, Hammer Down, Hail Purdue”. And so I can think about Boiler Up in West Lafayette, Hammer Down here in Indy, and we're all part of one Purdue University. And so that is the model, and that's what my role is, is to support student growth, program advancement for the institution. **What are you excited about for this semester in Indianapolis and what's new this semester that students should be excited about?** So this is the third year since the change in transition. And as you can see, there's just a lot of tremendous year-over-year growth. We're less than 10 months away from the new building opening, the 15-story Academic Success Building, which is going to add a lot more opportunity and a home base for Purdue students. But in advance of that, we've been very busy to increase the opportunities and places and spaces as well as programmatic things for students in Indianapolis to focus on and take advantage of. You know, everybody should know by this point, it's the same expectations and rigor between Indianapolis and West Lafayette, same departments are administering programs in both locations and the same colleges are operating in both. But we have a focus on industry connectedness and getting out into the workforce and connecting with companies, like this week with Rolls-Royce. And to support that, we have a couple of important summits that are upcoming that are in Indianapolis that Purdue is a sponsor of, and we're trying to get as many students to participate in as we can. There's a Google AI Summit coming in October, and that is here in Indianapolis. Great opportunity to meet with industry executives in that space. Around the same time in October is the AI Life Sciences Summit that Purdue is a primary sponsor of, and it's a great way to get to know and meet company leadership from around the city. And this includes companies like Eli Lilly and Roche and Cook Medical Companies and those that do engineering and medicine. So that's coming in October as well. We have launched the Smart Center, which is a special one-stop shop for getting academic support in physics, chemistry, math, and College of Science courses, CS. This adds to the Academic Success Center that does a lot of tutoring in the Student Center. We have acquired the Vonnegut Museum and now there are Purdue hours that extend into the evening and love to get more students to take advantage of that. Great place to study. There's a cafe in the upper level, so you can get coffee and snacks and things, and that can grow. We've added extra bus routes for evening football games to increase, you know, the chance to get to connect and have door-to-door transportation. We added campus transit, so we're building more relationships with 16 Tech, which has a lot of startup companies. They also have the AMP Food Hall, which has a lot of the restaurants that are in shipping containers that are really small businesses that are really fun. Several reduced cost ticket opportunities for things in the city to grow. You know, one of my primary focuses is to find more ways to bring the city in as part of the experience. And one of the things that helps doing that is to lower the cost of attendance for things that take place around the city. Working a lot more to get support from the Indy Chamber and others in that space. Xbox curricular program is an exciting new thing. For several, for lots of students, there's gonna be, they're still working on the date, several events, one’s going to be sometime this fall, some more in the spring, and as well as a long four-week program, we're gonna have the connectedness with Microsoft. We have more spaces. There's the Purdue Canal Park that's reservable to do activities along the canal. There's classes now taking place in classrooms in Canal Square on the canal level. Excited to see the Indy Explorers Research Program launch. It's a course as well as a financial supplement for students to do research experiences while in Indianapolis, and continuing the Indy Trailblazers program to see there's a lot of successful student club growth. So we launched that last year and it's really taken root and becoming something that is a unique way to grow fast. Lots of other things, lots of other things planned and coming, but that is to kick things off this semester. In addition to all of the career visits, we have Honda coming, we already had Rolls \[Royce\] come, we have Cummins coming, and just a bunch more industry mixers and ways to bring industry to campus. **What have you learned in the first two years of Indianapolis and how does that influence your current work?** Yeah, that's a great question. I think, you know, some of the things that we've really leaned into and learned are ways to improve the speed at which we can get company relationships built. You know, really, a really unique value, and we're just leaning into it and doubling down on it is building these pipelines for work experience in the classroom through things like Vertically Integrated Projects, work with AI, through then also working with building facilities alongside companies. So there’s the Dallara Motorsports facility. There's a facility for graduate students that's part of a radiopharmaceuticals company called Spectron RX that teaches people how to handle things like Pluvicto, which are drugs that treat cancer. And there's more that are being mapped out and built with companies. You know, as part of that, I think we've learned better about what companies need. We've also learned a lot about more ways to accelerate the growth of what we want for student experience. This has led to things like trailblazers and ways to kickstart more student clubs, student activities. Also getting more spaces activated for students to be creative and to build things and to thrive. We've added, we've worked a lot with the colleges and the individual departments and colleges not in the majors to grow breadth. And we're accelerating that growth. It's been geometric growth in terms of courses, but we're working to make it even faster so that there's just more and more course offerings, whether that be philosophy, political science, creative writing, things in the arts, in addition to the core STEM courses and growing those out more. The other thing that we've learned is that it really, really makes a lot of sense to lean into distinctive strengths. We're small, but smallness can be a strength that allows us to move faster and to build things that can be serving students across the board. The Smart Center is an example of that. It's a one-stop shop for multiple different courses to get that support. But it also allows us to do pilots and programs that can have more hands-on experience, like the upcoming Xbox program, where there's going to be the teams that build games and learn about entrepreneurship and marketing and everything else that goes along with it. This is a question I could go on and on and on, you know, because there's just a lot of learnings from this. And I think what I've also learned and appreciated a lot is just how entrepreneurial and intrepid the students are, especially the first, you know, two classes. It takes a lot to be first. It takes, it's not easy. You know, and I've seen a lot of students embrace what I call a Boilermaker start, which means, you know, there's something there's something that you that you see that you want to lean into more and to grow, and we want to partner with students to help them achieve that and grow. Think about what that does for your CV. Think about what that does in the long run when you come back in 10 or 20 years and you see the things that you started, you know, persisting and you were the inaugural lead. You were true pioneers. And so just seeing, you know, more and more ways to do that for students and support that growth. **One of the most exciting parts of the vision for Purdue in Indianapolis is that students can choose either location that they can spend their time at, so whether that be West Lafayette or Indianapolis. Are there any plans to encourage more West Lafayette students to visit Indianapolis or spend a semester in Indianapolis and vice versa?** Yes, both ways. You know, right now, initially, and we expected this as part of the plan, you know, we want to have opportunity to access the breadth, you know, but it does require taking a bus. There's 8 round trip buses per day. And as demand grows, the number of routes will grow. And so that's why we've added some routes for football games and things, watching that data. But we have had a lot of students come from West Lafayette to Indy. And that is something that there's a concerted efforts on now because, as part of this transformation, Indianapolis is a great place to have a finishing school too. To think, you know, I've gotten some training, but I really want to get some more experience with the industry. And so we had limits, though, because we had two different curricula we were teaching at the same time. We had the curricula for the legacy students, the IUPUI students that came over. And that's a different accreditation and a different curricula than the West Lafayette curricula. So the first two years, we couldn't really bring down lots of students because the course coverage wouldn't allow them to progress towards their degree. That's changed this year. We have through junior year. Next year, it'll be a full through four years. And so students can, you can complete your degree in Indy as a finishing school. We have, you know, lots of students currently taking courses in West Lafayette. We even have lots of students who are taking even a majority of their courses, especially advanced students who need the more breadth, taking a majority of their courses in West Lafayette. And so with access to the course catalog and this being one university, you know, as long as there's rooms in those classes, then it's great that the students can take advantage of that, you know, so that they can take advantage of that breadth as we grow and build. But as we build out the more junior and senior year curriculum and we have more and more industry connected programs and more new programs like the pre-medicine and health program that is launching, there is keen interest from West Lafayette students to come get more hands-on experiences, to do co-ops, to do internships, and to work on completing their degrees in Indianapolis, in addition to West Lafayette. So you should expect to see more and more colleagues, especially in your senior year, coming, you know. We have programs now like Indy Amplified that runs during the summer. We're launching an Indy Amplified in the spring too. And that one was a summer and it was 50-50 West Lafayette and Indianapolis students. And it was a great program that brings student leaders to connect with city leaders, with business leaders, and to learn from alumni and get to learn from each other. So that is the model. **The official numbers haven't been released yet, but there appears to be a drop in enrollment for large majors in Indianapolis, such as Mechanical Engineering and CS for both last year and this year. Are you concerned about this at all?** So I think we've seen, you know, there's some national trends that were hitting certain areas more than others. Last year, you know, there's no doubt that nationwide there was a dramatic shifting of where students were studying from, you know, computer science and other areas, but we've seen a lot of growth in other areas as well. So there's some, as AI has impacts on the marketplace and there's some sorting going on, I think that what I'm seeing is that overall, there's shifting in where students are joining and what kind of programs they're getting into. And so there's tremendous growth in Motorsports and Polytech programs. Like you mentioned, you witnessed some enrollment drop in CS and Mechanical is flat. And I think that as there are more distinctives and more hands-on programs come online, you're going to see that that's going to be a driver for more student interest and more of those distinctives. We've had tremendous growth in graduate programs, almost double the number of graduate students this year as well. So as this grows more into programs that support the hands-on learning and get more industry connectedness, we have plans for enrollment growth. In fact, Mitch \[Daniels\] has gone on record and we have plans to increase enrollment by nearly double by 2031\. And the team is working on that and continuing to grow in those majors that make sense for the city, that makes sense for those that want these types of hands-on experiences, and those that want to work alongside companies and tech partners. **To circle back to the last question I asked, how are you advertising Indianapolis to current West Lafayette students? Are you telling them about current programs or is this just like talking to them and telling them about Indianapolis?** Yeah, there's a team, there's a team working on this, and we'd love to find more ways to get, you know, students to help bring more friends and partners from West Lafayette to Indianapolis. But, you know, I think now's the time that advisors are getting able to say, look, you know, you can complete your degree in Indianapolis. We have two career councils. We have the Indianapolis Career Council. We have the West Lafayette Career Council. Both of those were created to provide a bridge of opportunities between the campuses so that students can identify them and find out how to enroll and engage in those. So for instance, as we grow these partnerships with more companies, or we grow the pipeline. Let me talk about the pre-med program, for instance. You know, that's in the Common App for this upcoming cycle, and we're building a structure that provides research, clinical experiences, as well as leadership experiences. There's scale of hospitals, there's scale of clinics, and you need these things to be successful at getting medical school applications to be successful. You need MCAT, a good GPA, but you also need leadership, research, and clinical experience. We can build those three facets at scale in Indianapolis. There's already been discussions about whether or not we'd be able to manage the scale of interest in that program for West Lafayette students that are going to desire to come for that. I expect we're hearing a lot of students interested in the Xbox program from West Lafayette, lots of students in the Polytech programs that are interested in construction management and other areas of getting into those industry connections, and so the word is getting out. The, while small numbers initially largely constrained by the availability of upper level courses to do so, there is a growing way of advertising internally, mostly through advisors. You know, advisors are the ones that are working with students on schedules and they can ask questions like, did you know? ‘Did you know that you could do this opportunity in Indianapolis’, but also through programs like Indy Amplified, we're looking at making curricular versions of Indy Amplified. And there are several other programmatic courses and things being built to bridge the campus, the locations closer together. Like I said, you know, the Boiler Up, Hammer Down, Hail Purdue. I really do think that, you know, it is a lever of both of these spots to build student student opportunities. **Do you have a message for students this semester you want to share, especially to new incoming students?** Yeah, absolutely, you know, I had a chance to speak to many of the incoming students at Boiler Gold Rush. And I mentioned it a little bit earlier, and this is a message that I think should really resonate with all students, and I call it having a Boilermaker start. You know, what does it mean to be a Boilermaker? And if you look at some of President Daniels’ speeches at graduation and things, it means about doing the hard work, embracing, you know, having grit, having that desire to see something and instead of waiting on somebody to do something about it, doing something about it yourself. It means challenging yourself and growing. I really see, you know, this, our role is to bring students along as part of their growth from high school into adulthood, both bringing opportunities, but also growth and having a growth mindset where you can come in and you see something and maybe you don't have the club you want, but there's an opportunity there to build the club that you want and to shape its future. So I call it having a Boilermaker start, showing up every day to learn, thinking about what would those pioneers that came before you, who are Boilermakers do? You know, what would Neil Armstrong do? What would Amelia Earhart do? What would Eugene Cernan do? He was the last person to walk on the moon. A Boilermaker start means seeing a challenge and then finding a way through and then having an accomplishment once you've successfully busted through whatever that challenge might be. It means getting out there and stretching yourself, exploring parts of the city that maybe you haven't seen before. It means being bold and walking up to that interview table and saying, ‘Hi, I'm A Boilermaker and I want to learn about your company because I think I can make a difference.’ And also doing that and supporting that growth of the overall Boilermaker student body and community. I'm really proud of the first two classes. I'm really excited about this new incoming class. And I'm excited to see this continuous growth of student leaders and just want to see for those that are in the first class finish so strong and leave their mark on this place forever. It's an opportunity that won't come again. And so I've already, I've seen it. It went from 2 to 83 registered student organizations in two years. Let's make that number 100\. And let's tell the world about what it is that you're accomplishing. That's my message to Boilermakers. --- *We check every Circuit article for accuracy. If you spot an error or omission, please email contact@circuitpress.org.*