Pictured Above: Sridhar Sundaram sees synergies between the goals of the university and the goals of the St. Petersburg Area Chamber of Commerce.
Courtesy of Sridhar Sundaram
By Sophie Ojdanic
The Tiedemann-Cotton dean of the Kate Tiedemann School of Business and Finance has been named chair of the Board of Governors at the St. Petersburg Area Chamber of Commerce.
Sridhar Sundaram, who has been at USF St. Petersburg since 2016, will serve in a one-year term in the chamber post.
He said he looks forward to the opportunities being chair will bring to the board and to the university.
“I thought this would be important for us as a college and as a university to be very involved in,” Sundaram said.
Sundaram is the first chair of the chamber from outside the business community. He said his position at the university gives him a different perspective, although there are parallels between the university and the local business community.
As campus dean, “I run a business that has a $12 million dollar budget, and I have about 60 employees, and have about 1,300 customers with five or six different product lines because I have different majors and graduate programs,” Sundaram said. “So in many ways we function like a business.”
In an interview with USF’s marketing and communications staff, Sundaram said, “It speaks volumes to what the campus has done with the chamber and other partners over the years to be given these responsibilities. It is a recognition of the role education partners can play in the community.”
The chair’s role, according to Sundaram, is to be the face of the chamber as well as its community liaison.
He said the role includes working “in coordination with the (chamber president), in helping with advocacy for the membership and supporting community efforts, but also looking at the chamber as an internal organization (and saying), ‘How can we continue to grow and evolve?’ ”
Before his appointment to the role, Sundaram served as chair of the chamber’s “grow smarter” initiative in 2019. According to the chamber’s website, the initiative “is an economic development strategy with a focus on equity.”
He said he hopes his position will benefit both the chamber and the university.
“There’s this huge synergy between what (the university is) doing as a part of our academic entrepreneurship program, and what the community is trying to accomplish also,” Sundaram said.
