New Provost Douglas W. Woods Begins First School Year at Loyola

Douglas W. Woods officially took the reins as the university’s Provost and Chief Academic Officer in July after he was selected for the role in February following a nationwide search.

Woods succeeds former provost Dr. Margaret Callahan who has returned to teaching and research while assisting with the transition. Callahan previously served as provost of Loyola’s health science division before she was selected to serve as provost on a temporary basis while the university underwent its presidential transition from Dr. Jo Ann Rooney to Dr. Mark C. Reed in 2022, The Phoenix reported. 

As one of the top officials in the university setting, a provost leads academic planning efforts and works with deans on academic support and student development, according to the Office of Provost’s website. 

Woods comes to Loyola after serving for eight years as the Dean of the Graduate School and Vice Provost for Graduate and Professional Studies at Marquette University. Prior to Marquette, Woods was Head of the Psychology Department at Texas A&M University and held multiple leadership roles at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. 

In addition to his work on the administrative side, Woods has remained active as both a professor and researcher, honing in specifically on developing non-drug treatments for children with tic disorders such as Tourette syndrome or obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Woods has maintained an active research lab, although he’s had to scale back some of the work while making the transition to Loyola, and has published numerous books and research articles on the subject. He said he and his team have shown through trials non-drug treatments are effective, and they are now working on getting them implemented as treatment options. 

“Before we started this work, the most common treatment that kids would get for tic disorders, the first line treatment that they would get would be antipsychotic medications, things like haloperidol or pimozide,” Woods said. “These could reduce the symptoms, but they have really negative side effects on the kids — weight gain, cognitive dolling, those kinds of things.”

He said one of the challenges is making the methods more accessible to people. As therapists must be trained on the procedures and drug companies maintain the effectiveness of their products.

“The behavior therapy, this non drug treatment, which is perfectly safe and as effective as these drugs but don’t have the side effects, that treatment is now recommended as the first line treatment in the US and Canada, in all of Europe,” Woods said. “So it’s been interesting for me because I’ve got to basically travel all over the world to train therapists how to do this work.” 

Outside of his career in academia, Woods is married and has two college-aged sons and a daughter in high school. He lives in Rogers Park near the Lake Shore Campus. He has recently gotten back into collecting vinyl records and is an avid runner, going on at least three to four runs a week.

“My normal route is to go down Sheridan and then cut over on Ardmore down to the lakefront and run by the beaches and the volleyball court,” he said. 

Woods said he wanted to get into administration while serving as a professor because he didn’t like some of the ways some things were working. His first administrative role was at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where he was in charge of the PhD program.

“I took that role because I was just not happy with the way our program was working,” he said. “So I’m like, ‘well, I can just sit there and complain about it, or I can do something to fix it.’ Ultimately what I found is that in these administrative roles, I could have a broader impact than I could just have myself.” 

Woods said this isn’t too different from what he found early on in his psychology career. Wood didn’t want to be a professor when he initially went into psychology, he said he instead wanted to help individuals directly as a therapist. But he realized as he was doing his research that he could have a much broader impact as he could affect how thousands of patients are being treated. 

While Woods had never worked within Jesuit education prior to arriving at Marquette, he said during his time there he really came to appreciate its values and teachings. He said he thinks Loyola is “very, very, very well positioned” and he was excited by all of the potential upside he sees in the university.

“We’re the biggest Jesuit university in the country, we’re in a world class city, we’re really embedded into the community, we’re a part of it, we learn from it, it benefits from us,” he said. “I think with the community and the opportunities we have here are just limitless in terms of the opportunities our students have to learn.”

Along with other similarly situated universities, Loyola is bracing for an anticipated enrollment drop set to begin in 2026, The Phoenix previously reported. Woods said Loyola will likely see around a 15% decrease in traditional undergrads coming to the school, roughly in line with the regional percentage decline in birth rate. 

However, he thinks the university has several areas from which it can make up that difference, including increasing the number of international students and students from other regions of the US who are enrolling.

“If we can increase the likelihood of students from underrepresented backgrounds coming to a university like Loyola that actually can help us counter the decline in enrollments that we would normally predict,” Woods said. “So the more inclusive we can become, the more we can show that you come here, you’ll be supported, you’ll feel part of the community that more, you’ll feel welcome, the better off we’re going to be in terms of enrollment and a lot of other things.”

He said being located in a global city like Chicago gives Loyola an advantage a lot of its peer institutions lack. Woods also said there are several programs within the university he thinks present great opportunities for growth in the coming years, including the graduate program and Stritch Medical Center.

Woods said he’s in for the long haul regarding some of the instability which has surrounded the Provost’s Office at Loyola in recent years.

Woods hopes to get back to being more active in research after adapting more to his new role. He said he thinks it’s important to stay involved in academic work because it keeps him in better touch with what the people he works with are going through. 

“When a faculty member comes to me and starts saying, you know, ‘I have a problem with this or that or this isn’t working as well,’ I know what they’re talking about,” he said. “Eventually my goal is to get back into the classroom here. And so I understand, you know, what the professors are dealing with, what the students are experiencing.”