Pictured Above: After five years at USF St. Petersburg, Sridhar Sundaram’s last day will be July 14.
Courtesy of Sridhar Sundaram
By Aya Diab
Sridhar Sundaram, the leader of USF St. Petersburg’s business and finance programs since 2016, has resigned to become dean of the College of Business and Finance at California State University, Fullerton.
His last day in St. Petersburg will be July 14.
“We had so much fun developing the College/School, I was not even looking for a job. But, sometimes you get recruited, and you look at an opportunity and say, this is a great opportunity as a next steppingstone for, for me professionally,” Sundaram said in an interview with The Crow’s Nest.
When he arrived in July 2016, Sundaram was dean of the Kate Tiedemann College of Business and USF St. Petersburg was an independently accredited university.
But when USF’s three campuses consolidated in July 2020, Sundaram’s college became a school under the Tampa campus-based Muma College of Business and his title changed.
“With consolidation, I was wearing two hats, I was responsible for as a campus dean for all the faculty and staff supporting them here, but also responsible for the finance programs across three campuses,” Sundaram said.
He is now dean of the Kate Tiedemann School of Business and Finance and Muma campus dean in St. Petersburg.
“Over the past two years, Sri skillfully guided the school through the consolidation of USF’s three campuses, collaborating with colleagues from Sarasota-Manatee and Tampa and ultimately serving as a model of cooperation,” Regional Chancellor Martin Tadlock said in an email to faculty.
Tadlock also praised Sundaram’s efforts to “strengthen the robust connections between our campus and the community.” He has served on the board of St. Anthony’s Hospital since 2019 and earlier this year became chair of the St. Petersburg Area Chamber of Commerce.
At Cal State Fullerton, Sundaram will oversee a college with more than 9,000 undergraduate and graduate students, 114 tenured or tenure-track faculty and 13 centers of excellence.
“What I was able to provide for this institution is my experience to provide strategic leadership on the academic side and identify where do we really want to strategically grow,” Sundaram said.
Under the rules of the agency that accredits USF, a unified university can have only one college for each academic discipline.
That meant all three of the St. Petersburg-based colleges — Business, Education, and Arts and Sciences — were subsumed by the larger Tampa campus during consolidation and their deans got lesser posts. (The College of Marine Science is also based in St. Petersburg, but it has reported to Tampa for years.)
Allyson Watson, the dean of St. Petersburg’s College of Education, departed in mid-2019, before the changes took effect. Education programs in St. Petersburg now are overseen by an interim associate dean.
As dean in St. Petersburg, Sundaram provided both strategic and operational leadership. He instilled a framework that helps develop a “complete business graduate” by implementing an education philosophy around KNOW (relevant knowledge), DO (experiential learning) and BE (student professional development).
Sundaram accomplished significant milestones for the school and helped shape its identity around other programs, Tadlock said.
“Under his leadership and thanks to his vision as campus dean, the school developed a distinctive identity around innovative programs, impactful research and intentional community engagement,” Tadlock said.
Before coming to St. Petersburg, Sundaram was the associate dean of all graduate programs and outreach centers at Grand Valley State University’s Seidman College of Business in Michigan. He was the academic director of the executive MBA program and the full-time integrated MBA program and he chaired the finance department until 2013.
He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in commerce from P.S.G College of Arts and Sciences in India, and his master’s and doctorate of business administration from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.
According to his staff bio, Sundaram has received numerous awards in recognition of his work.
He received the “Niemeyer Award” in 2008-2009 for his outstanding teaching, research and service at Grand Valley State. He was also awarded the “Service Award” in 2009 from the Seidman College of Business alumni for his extraordinary work following the financial crisis in 2008.
His research, focused on banking regulatory effects and asset pricing, is widely published in scholarly and practitioner journals, including respected finance journals such as the Journal of Banking and Finance, the Journal of Quantitative and Financial Analysis and the Financial Review.
“It has been a great honor to serve” in St. Petersburg, Sundaram said in Tadlock’s announcement.
