Meet the Provost
Colin S. Duckett became Provost and Chief Academic Officer of Boston University in July 2026. As the University’s second-ranking officer, he provides leadership for BU’s academic mission and planning and oversees the deans of its 17 schools and colleges and the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences, with responsibility spanning research, faculty affairs, undergraduate and graduate education, enrollment, student affairs, and the libraries.
Dr. Duckett came to BU from Duke, where he served as executive vice dean for basic science in the School of Medicine. In this role, he led research strategy and graduate training across the school, overseeing faculty recruitment, the biomedical PhD programs, and research infrastructure, with the school’s basic science departments within his purview. He partnered closely with the deans of Arts & Sciences and Engineering on joint recruitment and interdisciplinary strategy, oversaw institutes spanning neuroscience, global health, and vaccine development, and strengthened international partnerships through the Duke–NUS (National University of Singapore) Medical School. He also began work to strengthen the school’s PhD programs, balancing foundational training with disciplinary depth.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, he directed the closure and reopening of Duke’s research laboratories while simultaneously serving as both the school’s vice dean and interim chair of one of its largest basic science departments — a response recognized among the most successful in the country. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2024, honored for both his contributions to immune cell signaling and for his service during the pandemic.
Earlier in his career, Dr. Duckett was chief scientific officer of the Baylor Scott & White Research Institute, leading research strategy for one of the nation’s largest nonprofit health systems. At the University of Michigan, he built a multidisciplinary research community in the former Pfizer complex and established public-private partnerships at scale.
A molecular biologist with over 23,000 citations, Dr. Duckett has published extensively on cellular death and signal transduction, particularly as these pertain to the pathobiology of HIV and cancers of the immune system. He has advised national science programs, including the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Department of Defense, and has served on numerous review panels and editorial boards.
He received his PhD in biochemistry from the University of London and completed postdoctoral training at the University of Chicago, where he co-discovered the IAP family of signaling proteins. He was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute fellow and served as a section chief in the Metabolism Branch of the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health.