Wake Forest University Appoints Susan R. Wente as Its Fourteenth – and First Woman – President

The board of trustees of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, has chosen Susan R. Wente as the educational institution’s fourteenth president. When she takes office on July 1, she will become the first woman to lead the university.

“I have long admired the people associated with Wake Forest,” Dr. Wente said. “This is a special institution, committed to excellence with a tremendous ability to develop leaders of great integrity for our world. I look forward to joining the Wake Forest community and working with the outstanding faculty, staff, students, and alumni to seize the multitude of opportunities for Wake Forest to excel even further as a national leader and model.”

Wake Forest University enrolls about 5,300 undergraduate students and slightly more than 3,200 graduate students according to the most recent data available from the U.S. Department of Education. Women make up 53 percent of the undergraduate student body.

Currently, Dr. Wente serves as provost and vice chancellor of academic affairs at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. She has been on the Vanderbilt faculty since 2002. Dr. Wente began her teaching career at Washington University’s School of Medicine, where she taught from 1993 to 2002.

Dr. Wente, a native of Nebraska, is a graduate of the University of Iowa, where she majored in biochemistry. She holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley.