Daniel Ennis, senior vice president for finance and administration, to join Duke University

Daniel Ennis, who has overseen Johns Hopkins University's budget, finances, investments, and administrative functions since 2010, will leave the university at the end of September for a position at Duke University.

Image caption: Daniel Ennis

As the university's senior vice president for finance and administration, Ennis stabilized and strengthened the university's financial foundation in the aftermath of the Great Recession and reformed the way in which the university makes decisions around capital projects, debt levels, and divisional financial performance, placing a premium on devising structures that promote transparency, accountability, responsiveness, and confidence.

He will assume the role of executive vice president at Duke on Dec. 1.

"For the last decade, Daniel has provided extraordinary leadership to Johns Hopkins and has earned the trust, confidence, and support of colleagues throughout our community and well beyond," Johns Hopkins University President Ronald J. Daniels wrote in a message announcing Ennis's departure to the Hopkins community today. "To all he has done at Hopkins, he has brought commanding professionalism, analytic rigor, unstinting dedication, and scrupulous fairness and integrity. Importantly, Daniel has always ensured that financial and operational decisions are made in service of the core academic mission of the university."

Ennis has been responsible for the university's finance, accounting, investment and money management functions; the real estate and audit offices; facilities management; purchasing; human resources; and safety and security across the university.

Among many significant contributions to Johns Hopkins, Ennis and his team have helped advance academic excellence and access with a historic expansion of financial aid; expanded the university's capacity for collaboration and support for faculty through cross-disciplinary ventures such as the Bloomberg Distinguished Professorships and the vision for a new home in the nation's capital at 555 Pennsylvania Ave.; and added supports for staff, including paid parental leave. Ennis has also been instrumental in shaping and supporting the university's signature economic inclusion programs in Baltimore, HopkinsLocal and BLocal.

"It has been an incredible privilege and pleasure to be a part of this amazing institution," Ennis said. "I am awed every day by the extraordinary contributions that our faculty, clinicians, trainees, and students make to the university, to the Baltimore community, the nation, and the world—all the while remaining humble and intensely focused on the work."

The university will soon launch a national search for Ennis's successor, Daniels said. Jane Schlegel, who joined the Office of Finance and Administration at the end of April in the newly created leadership role of vice president and chief administrative officer, will continue to oversee the areas of human resources, procurement, information technology, and risk management and compliance. Helene Grady, presently JHU's vice president for planning and budget, will be promoted to chief financial officer, a role in which she will manage the university's financial functions and oversee the management of the investment program for the university's endowment and other assets.

"I wish to thank directly the colleagues who have been part of my team, both centrally and in the schools. They have all been great teammates, but also great advisors and problem-solvers as we navigated both opportunities and challenges," Ennis said. "Last by certainly not least, I am beyond grateful to President Daniels. He took a big chance 10 years ago in appointing me into this role at a relatively early stage in my career. He has been an incredible mentor to me as I learned my job and is a leader who truly motivates my best performance and that of my leadership team in serving and stewarding this wonderful university."

As executive vice president, Ennis will oversee Duke's administrative and financial affairs, including the budget, procurement, debt, campus planning, architecture, maintenance and construction, real estate, human resources, academic and administrative computing, audit, safety and security, and auxiliary services.

"Daniel Ennis will be a visionary and transformative leader for Duke," Duke University President Vincent E. Price said. "He brings extraordinarily strong experience at a great research university and a great medical school, along with a deep commitment to the core values that are so important to us."

Before joining Johns Hopkins, Ennis had served since 2007 as chief administrative officer at Harvard Medical School. Before that, he was Harvard University's associate vice president for finance and financial planning; interim director of treasury management; and director of budgets, financial planning and institutional research.

Ennis is a 1992 graduate of Boston College and completed a dual master's degree program at Harvard, earning an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a master's in public administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He began his career as a financial analyst at Goldman Sachs & Co. and worked as a consultant at McKinsey and Co., where he led a strategic review of Harvard's central administration that resulted in a number of significant organizational changes.