Dr. Marlene Tromp

Dr. Marlene Tromp is the 7th president of Boise State University. She is committed to supporting students and faculty, serving and advancing the state of Idaho, and helping the university foster research excellence to increase discovery for its students and the world.

Before joining Boise State in July 2019, Dr. Tromp was the campus provost and executive vice chancellor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, ranked by U.S. News and World Report as the 26th best public university in the country. Before joining the University of California system – broadly recognized as the premier public university system in the country – Dr. Tromp was the dean of Arizona State University’s New Interdisciplinary College of Arts and Sciences and the vice provost of the university’s West Campus.

She grew up in Green River, Wyoming, a trona mining town along Interstate 80 that saw its population jump three-fold in the 1970s when nearby mines led an economic boom. Her father worked at one of the mines. Neither of her parents were college graduates, but they supported their two daughters’ college aspirations – especially when Tromp decided she was going to become a doctor. She earned scholarships to Creighton University, nearly 800 miles away in Omaha, Nebraska, but the financial challenges remained tangible.

Though bound for medical school, she fell in love with Robert Browning’s poetry. Instead, she would go on to earn her bachelor’s degree in English, come home to Wyoming to complete a master’s degree and then study for her doctorate at the University of Florida. There, she wrote a dissertation on Victorian novels and the new laws being written then on domestic violence.