Brandeis hired its new vice president of campus operations, Lois A. Stanley, who will begin her new role on Oct. 15. Stanley’s responsibilities include overseeing “Facilities Services, Public Safety, Capital Programs, Events Management, Dining Services, Health and Safety, Sustainability, Emergency Management and University Services,” according to an email from Executive Vice President for Finance and Administration Stewart Uretsky.
After she applied last spring, Stanley heard back fairly quickly, she wrote to The Brandeis Hoot in an email.
“The position is a strong fit with my background in higher education campus operations. Brandeis University was also a big draw for me, especially because of its principles of social justice, diversity and inclusiveness,” Stanley wrote to The Hoot.
Stanley is the current capital renewal and campus planning director at Tufts University. She has worked at the university for over four years now, and during her time there, helped develop Tufts’ first comprehensive five-year capital planning process.
“Lois oversaw strategic planning and implementation for Tufts’ deferred maintenance program and led the early planning and programing for all cross-school capital projects in recent years, totaling 450,000 square feet for social sciences, life sciences and engineering, Tisch College, visual and media arts, the Gordon Institute and data-intensive studies,” read the email from Uretsky.
Stanley expanded on her work on deferred maintenance at Tufts in an email to The Hoot.
“At Tufts, I created the first campus planning department. Our office provides many services to the university including… steering campus-wide initiatives like all-gender restrooms and increasing social spaces, long-term capital planning in partnership with Finance, and, most recently, for launching a university-wide space governance initiative.”
Prior to her time at Tufts, Stanley worked for eight years at Harvard.
Stanley earned several degrees, including a bachelor of science in business management from Virginia Tech, a master of city planning degree from Georgia Tech, and a Ph.D. in urban studies and planning from MIT, according to the email from Uretsky.
Stanley will be taking over for Interim Vice President Dick Reynolds, who stepped in after previous vice president, Jim Gray, left. Gray worked on many projects at Brandeis, including closing down part of the Castle, opening Skyline and reducing the university’s carbon footprint. Gray had worked at Brandeis for five years but left in April 2019 to join Smith College as the associate vice president for facilities and operations.
According to a March 2019 article from The Hoot, Gray said, “I was receptive when Smith reached out to me through an executive recruiting firm largely because of the attractiveness to me and my partner of Northampton and Western Mass, which we like very much.”
