President’s Letter
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Dear Friends,
This Easter, our Rome Program students stood among tens of thousands in St. Peter’s Square to receive what would be Pope Francis’ final papal blessing. Then, less than two weeks later, some witnessed a moment of profound historical and spiritual significance: the election of the first American pope. And not from a distance — they were close enough to see his expression, to hear the crowd’s prayerful hush give way to thunderous joy.
It was, for many of them, the moment they understood what it means to be formed not just by a university, but by a Catholic university — a place where faith and reason, wonder and truth, friendship and formation come together in daily life and in moments that shape one’s entire future. At the University of Dallas, our vision remains fixed on our North Star: academic excellence, forming character, serving Church and country, and more fully realizing our calling as the nation’s best Catholic liberal arts institution. We are pursuing that vision with energy — and, as you’ll read in this report, with remarkable fruit.
As I reflect on this year, I am filled with gratitude — for our students, who rise to the call of excellence; for our faculty, who live the vocation of teacher-scholar; and for you, whose generosity and prayers sustain our mission. At a time when many universities are losing public trust, UDallas remains unapologetically focused on the pursuit of truth through an education committed to the recovery and renewal of Western civilization and the Christian intellectual tradition — one that, as Pope St. John Paul II stated, challenges students “to think rigorously, so as to act rightly and to serve humanity.” This is what a university should be. And by God’s grace, this is what the University of Dallas will continue to be for generations to come.
Faithfully,
Jonathan J. Sanford, Ph.D.
President, University of Dallas
2024 - 2025
President’s Letter
This Easter, our Rome Program students stood among tens of thousands in St. Peter’s Square to receive what would be Pope Francis’ final papal blessing. Then, less than two weeks later, some witnessed a moment of profound historical and spiritual significance: the election of the first American pope. And not from a distance — they were close enough to see his expression, to hear the crowd’s prayerful hush give way to thunderous joy.
AI for Good: PediMinds Wins Big
Maria Gutierrez, MS ’25, is using artificial intelligence to serve one of the most sensitive areas of human need: children’s mental health. Her AI agent, PediMinds, guides caregivers through widely used screenings like the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), offering personalized resources and actionable insights to support a child’s emotional well-being.
Knowledge or Gossip?
Dr. Brett Bourbon, professor of English, and Dr. Renita Murimi, associate professor of cybersecurity, co-authored Organized Skepticism in the Age of Misinformation: Surviving the Kingdom of Gossip, a rare interdisciplinary work exploring how we define, model and misunderstand information.
Cultivating Leaders Through a Distinctive, Real-World Curriculum
The Satish and Yasmin Gupta College of Business is boldly reinventing graduate business education. In August, under the leadership of Dean J. Lee Whittington, PhD, the college launched a revamped curriculum aimed at enriching instruction by explicitly aligning its courses with the university’s Catholic intellectual tradition.
UDallas Scholar Honors Conrad on His Centenary
Dr. Debra Romanick Baldwin, professor of English, marked the centenary of Joseph Conrad’s passing with the publication of two major works: The Inwardness of Things: Joseph Conrad and the Voice of Poetry, a monograph resulting from decades of research, and The Routledge Companion to Joseph Conrad, an international collection that she edited featuring 28 essays from 12 countries.
UDallas Physics Student Wins Top Research Award
Genevieve Alpar, BS ’25, received the Robert S. Hyer Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Research from the Texas Section of the American Physical Society, an honor that recognizes the top undergraduate physics research in the state.
Dialogue Across Disciplines
UDallas is well-known for dialogue across disciplines, and this year, faculty from six different departments have teamed up to teach a brand-new seminar course titled Natural Philosophy, exploring the nature of knowledge and the physical world.
National Avg: 27% At UDallas: 74%
Statistically, only 27% of first-generation college students in the U.S. graduate within four years, and only 50% graduate at all. But at UDallas, our first-gen students are far exceeding those national statistics.
A Summer Like No Other: Rome Edition
For the past 12 years, the university has offered a summer version of the cornerstone Rome Program for students who wouldn’t otherwise be able to experience it — athletes, seminarians, transfer students, bachelor of science majors and even students from other universities.
Serving the Church Through Bioethics
Associate Professor of Theology Dr. Irene Alexander published an award-winning article in September 2019 in The Linacre Quarterly titled “Humility Before New Scientific Evidence: We No Longer Have Moral Certainty That Brain Death Is True Death.”
College Citizens: A Taste of Catholic Liberal Arts Education
The first-generation initiatives in the Office of Academic Success make a difference in the lives of UDallas students — and for the past four years, they have been making a difference in the lives of local high school students, too.
Bringing Shakespeare to Incarcerated Youth
Associate Professor and Drama Department Chair, Kyle Lemieux, MFA, BA ’98, has been serving students at UDallas as a professor since 2008. This past year, he spent countless hours serving another population of youth: the residents of the Henry Wade Juvenile Detention Center in Dallas, offering his professional expertise on a project called Shakespeare for Incarcerated Youth.
