Dear UMBC Community, 

I am thrilled to announce the appointment of Tracey A. Reeves as Vice President for Communications and Marketing at UMBC. Tracey is a strategic thinker whose experience, expertise, and capacities as a highly collaborative leader will enable us to take communications and marketing at UMBC to great new heights in service of our ambitious aims. She joins UMBC from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, where she serves currently as vice president for communications and marketing. She will begin at UMBC on June 3.

In her role at Bates, Tracey has been a trusted advisor to the president and senior leadership team on all aspects of strategic communications, and she has led a 17-member team of professionals in advancing Bates’ enrollment marketing, media relations, storytelling, and crisis and emergency response communications efforts, among others. She is a data-driven planner who is skilled at change management, building and supporting teams, and leveraging technology to help strengthen organizations and their brands.

At Bates and, before that, at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she served first as assistant vice president for campus communications and then as associate vice president for research, academic, and faculty communications, Tracey developed and led comprehensive strategic plans for communications and marketing. She successfully implemented those plans through myriad challenges both local and global, including the COVID-19 pandemic, a national racial reckoning, deepening political and cultural divides, and, tragically, a mass shooting in Lewiston. Her skills and sensitivity in navigating crises are matched by her ability to envision and deliver innovative strategic initiatives, including several to promote Georgia Tech’s $1.2-billion research enterprise and the impact of its research on the communities it serves.

In joining our community at UMBC, Tracey is returning to the Baltimore area that she loves, a region where she spent more than two decades, including for the 10 years she served as director of media relations at the Johns Hopkins University. At Johns Hopkins from 2008 through 2018, she led a team of media relations representatives for the university’s central communications office, crafted high-level messaging and announcements, and served as a university spokesperson. She joined Johns Hopkins following a successful career as a newspaper reporter, including as a national and congressional correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and as a staff writer and assistant editor with The Washington Post. 

I know that Tracey is excited to return to Maryland and deeply inspired by UMBC’s mission and vision and the opportunity to join this institution she has long admired. As we welcome her, we embark upon a new era for communications and marketing at the university—to build upon UMBC’s remarkable momentum to help strengthen and sustain our position among the nation’s leading institutions and create the future we envision for UMBC. I could not be more enthusiastic about Tracey taking on this role, and I am grateful to the search committee and all who participated in this effort that has resulted in such an outstanding appointment. Thank you, and welcome, Tracey!

Sincerely,

President Valerie Sheares Ashby