Nature hasn’t always been her refuge, but Ana Mari Cauce will tell you it’s a habit she acquired since moving to Washington in 1987. And now, when she wants to explore ideas, get to know someone better or just unwind, she steps outside. “There’s nothing better,” Cauce says. “The physical beauty here draws you out.” Whether she’s walking among students, visiting the heron rookery on campus or wandering a beach with her pup, she finds inspiration in the world around her.
That blend of groundedness and vision has defined Cauce’s decade-long tenure as president of the University of Washington. She became the UW’s 33rd president with no grand personal aspirations, but with a lifelong dedication to education, research and equity. She stepped up because the University of Washington needed her—and because she believed in what a public university could do when it worked for its people.
In the end, her legacy isn’t just accomplishments, it’s building a culture marked by trust, transparency and a belief that higher education can be both excellent and accessible.
Now, as she prepares to step down, Ana Mari Cauce leaves behind a university transformed.
1 Call her Ana Mari. She answers to “Professor,” “Doctor” and “President,” but Ana Mari Cauce has never been the kind of leader who demands honorifics or special attention. Throughout campus and across Washington, students, alumni and community and political leaders have described her as refreshingly approachable. She’s open about her childhood as a Cuban immigrant, the challenges of her job as the University president and the many places she finds joy—including dancing at football games, exploring tide pools with young family members and cheering at the October 2024 announcement of Professor David Baker’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Once, while attending a conference in Turkey, she was heading for a hotel breakfast when a familiar tune stopped her in her tracks. “I couldn’t believe it,” she says. “It was a UW Alumni tour, and they were singing, ‘Bow Down to Washington.’”
When people send her emails, Cauce writes back. When they post notes to her Facebook page, she answers.
She drives to work in a practical, compact SUV. She totes her own dry cleaning for evening events. She’s funny and self-deprecating, once describing a class she taught on stress and coping as “useful subjects for a university president.”
2 She describes herself as an “accidental administrator.” The UW has been Cauce’s professional home for almost 40 years. Her plans were to build a career in research and teaching. The field of psychology stimulated her as a scientist, but “it also touched my heart,” she says. She focused on adolescent development, with an emphasis on the developmental trajectories of at-risk youth.
Landing at the UW in 1986, “when I was a bean sprout,” she says, she navigated the complexities of tenure and secured a foothold as an associate professor in just four years. When she was tasked with running the department’s clinical training program and then asked to serve as chair, she thought she would “take my turn” and then go back to work. She worried about missing time with her students and her research.
“My first real administrative post came when I became chair of American Ethnic Studies,” she says. She was affiliated with the department, but not a full member. And in 1996, the department was in turmoil, with faculty concerns and student unrest. When she became chair, “they thought I came in to close the department,” she says. Quite the contrary, Cauce calmed the storm. She attended every class, won the trust of the faculty and students, and in the end, she was celebrated. “I realized how I could really make a difference as an academic administrator,” she says.
Years—and a handful of administrative posts—later, she was quite happy working as the University’s provost. “I hadn’t really thought about being president,” she says. “But the University needed me to do it.”
3 She was the right leader at the right time. On a February morning in 2015, UW President Michael K. Young stunned campus by announcing he was leaving to lead Texas A&M. Already thinking about how to respond, Cauce, who was serving as provost, announced: “We’re not going to skip a beat.”
Word of Young’s departure had barely spread before Provost Cauce was named interim president. “She had this vast amount of experience and perspective and so many ideas of what we could do to even improve from where we were,” says Bill Ayer, ’78, then chair of the Board of Regents and former CEO of Alaska Airlines.
Though Cauce gave no sign she wanted the job permanently, many on campus and in the alumni community saw her as the clear choice. Her years in leadership roles across the UW and her steady success inspired confidence.
The regents were looking for someone who could lead the University into the next decade, whose modus operandi was getting big things done. “She had made a lot of decisions that not everybody agreed with. Yet everybody liked her,” Ayer says. Still, the board launched a national search, and then came back to the obvious choice. Everyone was “sky high on Ana Mari,” Ayer says. “We paid attention to that.”
4 Cauce had no time to waste. Though she couldn’t see the future, she was ready for what she described at the time as “the big, messy, hairy, complex work we do together in the service of others, in pursuit of our public mission.”
In fall of 2014, protests and calls for racial justice started sweeping the country. The Black Lives Matter movement was building on campuses from Seattle to Baltimore, Minneapolis to Los Angeles. Michael Brown, an 18-year-old in Missouri, had died at the hands of police, and students were demanding action on racial equity. “Lives were being lost,” says Ed Taylor, vice provost and dean of undergraduate academic affairs. “These were really hard times both on campus and in our nation.”
Cauce gathered University leaders and asked what they thought of her giving a campuswide speech on race and equity. Every one of them advised against it, Taylor says, warning it could jeopardize her career.
“But she led with her values and led with her heart at that moment,” he says, adding that they soon realized she had already decided. That speech, delivered in spring 2015, launched the university-wide Race and Equity Initiative, placing anti-racism and equity at the center of the University’s priorities and challenging everyone on campus to address their own biases and build a more inclusive culture.
“She cares deeply and sincerely about our students and their holistic development.”
Ed Taylor, ’94, Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Academic Affairs
5 She is good in a crisis. In winter 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, confusing and often conflicting information emerged about a new, virulent coronavirus. With the nation’s first confirmed case on its doorstep, the UW—home to a major medical research enterprise and strong expertise in public health—became “campus zero.”
In those early days, Cauce met almost daily with health experts and campus leaders to assess what lay ahead. “One of the things that really impressed me during this chaotic time was how willing she was to meet and sit and listen,” says Dr. Geoff Gottlieb, an infectious disease expert who chaired the University’s advisory committee on infectious diseases. Cauce consistently sought input from medical and public-health experts and made herself available—often at a moment’s notice—as she was exploring how best to meet student needs and whether to move instruction online. “Ana Mari took all the information she could get from all the different quarters of campus” and from peer institutions in California and the East Coast, Gottlieb says. “Somebody had to go first, and the UW was often the first to make some of these hard decisions. Other schools in Washington state and across the country were often following our lead.”
At the time, it wasn’t clear who would be hit hardest by the virus. Ultimately, younger people fared better. In hindsight, Cauce was right to act early. “We weren’t just thinking about the undergraduates,” Gottlieb says. “We were trying to think about the whole campus—staff, faculty, the University District and students with underlying medical conditions who were at higher risk.”
Gottlieb hadn’t worked closely with Cauce before the pandemic, but he was quickly impressed by her calm, factual communication about the virus and the University’s response. “She was good about conveying uncertainty,” he says. “She was the perfect person at a terrible time.”
6 She had the trust of the faculty. These days, most university presidents come from the outside. Cauce rose through the ranks, starting as an entry-level assistant professor. “When I came here, I did not expect to stay,” she says. “I thought I would go back to the East Coast, where I belonged.” But the vibrant city, the rich arts scene and the “incredible, majestic beauty” of the landscape proved irresistible. Though based in a major city, the campus felt like a small town. Cauce could bike to her office, go in at any hour and create a close-knit, campus-based family for her students.
Cauce was also drawn to the UW culture, the expectation that she would succeed and the overall feeling of ambition and collaboration across campus. Getting her first grant on the first try fueled her early success as a teacher, mentor and researcher. “But I certainly didn’t do it alone,” she says.
Many faculty say they see themselves in her, says Professor Alexes Harris, ’97. “She has created a culture that allows so many of us to be us.” Whether it is in the classroom or in research, “I can show up 100% me,” says Harris, who, as an African American woman, values that space. A faculty regent since 2022 and the UW faculty athletics representative since 2019, Harris has seen Cauce prioritize students—even stepping away from formal events to enter protests and encampments so students felt heard. “What she did as a leader was always about this institution and our students,” Harris says. “She loves this place. … She is probably the best president ever.”
7 She charts her own path. As the first openly gay, first Latina, first first-generation immigrant and first woman to serve full time as president of the University of Washington, Cauce didn’t just make history, she opened new possibilities. “If you’re going to break barriers, why not go for all of them?” she says. In doing so, she has created space for future university leaders from underrepresented backgrounds to more easily see themselves in roles like hers, and to believe they belong there.
Today, it is rare for a university president to rise from the faculty ranks. But in Cauce’s case, her tenure is central to her success as president. “Anyone who survives a decade as the president of a major university in the United States, we should not just say thank you, we should take a moment to stand in awe because it is among the most difficult jobs” in the country, says Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, who has a long relationship with the UW as an adviser and donor.
8 A planner and a dreamer, as president, Cauce placed a premium on innovation, research and cross-discipline collaboration. In 2016, she launched the Population Health Initiative, an ambitious 25-year project that has funded more than 200 projects involving over 500 faculty members and working with community-based organizations.
She is widely admired for strengthening ties to the community and making herself and the University more accessible. Coming from the tech sector, Microsoft’s Smith has seen her deepen partnerships with the tech industry to benefit UW students as well as the region’s innovation economy. “I’ve worked closely with Ana Mari to advance specific projects that are now part of the landscape of Washington state,” Smith says. Among them are the Global Innovation Exchange—a partnership with Microsoft and Tsinghua University in China—and CoMotion, the UW’s innovation hub, which helps graduate students and faculty protect their intellectual property, fund advisers and investors and bring their research discoveries to market.
“It’s easy to work with her because of her tremendous experience,” says philanthropist Susan Brotman, widow of Costco founder Jeff Brotman, ’64. The couple’s long history of engagement with the UW includes co-founding the Brotman Baty Institute, a precision medicine lab at UW Medicine.
“President Cauce loves this university so much, and it’s so obvious in everything she says and does,” Brotman says. “Everyone wants her to be in the room.”
9 She is for all of Washington. As Cauce was starting her work as interim president, Washington State University announced it was pulling out of the UW-led WWAMI program, which trains medical students from Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho. Cauce quickly traveled to Spokane to meet with Gonzaga University president Thayne McCulloh and explore how to continue training students in eastern Washington.
“Anyone who survives a decade as the president of a major university in the United States, we should not just say thank you, we should take a moment to stand in awe because it is among the most difficult jobs in the country.”
Brad Smith, president of Microsoft
“From day one, she was in Spokane,” says Dave Clack, ’57, a longtime leader the city’s economic development. His wife, Mari, ’58, served 12 years as a UW regent. “Ana Mari made it clear the UW was the university for all of Washington,” Clack says. One year later, Cauce and McCulloh announced a formal medical education partnership and 60 students began their training on the Gonzaga campus that fall. Today, the UW-Gonzaga partnership operates out of a new 90,000-square-foot building where about 120 UW medical students learn alongside Gonzaga nursing and health sciences students and UW’s MEDEX Northwest physician assistant trainees. Cauce’s swift action “completely changed the landscape here,” Clack says.
Last but not least, her love for the UW is genuine. Ed Taylor, ’94, who joined the faculty in the mid-1990s, remembers walking across campus when a wave of imposter syndrome hit him. “Out of nowhere, I looked to my right and Ana Mari was walking next to me. She said, ‘Hi Ed. We’ve got good important work to do here,’” he says. “Then she pointed to the administration building and said, ‘There’s important work to do there as well.’” At that moment, Taylor realized Cauce didn’t just see him as a faculty member—she saw his potential to contribute more broadly to the University. Now vice provost and dean, he reflects on her deep commitment to the institution. “She doesn’t have a hidden agenda, and she’s not political in any sense I’ve ever seen,” he says. “But she cares deeply and sincerely about our students and their holistic development.” Before she was president, as the architect of the Husky Promise—launched in 2007— Cauce championed students facing financial barriers. The program has supported more than 60,000 students from low-income families by pairing federal aid with local grants and scholarships, to cover full-time tuition and fees.
As Ana Mari Cauce’s presidency draws to a close, her leadership at the University of Washington stands as a testament to grand aspirations grounded in a deep affinity for the institution. Under her guidance, the University has grown and flourished, advancing public health, championing social justice, strengthening athletics and expanding the reach of innovation and inclusion. She has shown what it means to love a university while pushing it to new heights—and shattering a few ceilings along the way. As she packs up a decade of books, papers and purple blazers and heads for a well-earned summer at the beach, Cauce can know that while her tenure has come to an end, her legacy will continue to shape the UW for generations to come.