Rachel Davis Mersey

Notable work and positions

Southern Methodist University — Executive Vice President and Provost (2025– )
University of Texas at Austin — Former Executive Vice President and Provost; former Dean, Moody College of Communication
Meta (Facebook) — Former Director of Global Research and Partnerships
Northwestern University, Medill School of Journalism — Former Professor and Associate Dean for Research

Biography

Rachel Davis Mersey is executive vice president and provost of Southern Methodist University, a position she began June 1, 2025. She began her career as a journalist at The Arizona Republic before earning a Ph.D. in mass communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She joined the faculty at the University of Minnesota in 2007 before moving to Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications in 2008, where she rose to professor and associate dean for research over more than a decade. In 2021, she left academia to become director of global research and partnerships at Meta, where she led an international team managing privacy-protected data-sharing initiatives with academic researchers, including the U.S. 2020 Facebook and Instagram Election Study. She became dean of the University of Texas at Austin's Moody College of Communication in June 2023, holding an appointment as the Everett D. Collier Centennial Chair in the School of Journalism and Media. She was named UT Austin's interim provost in August 2024 and its executive vice president and provost in January 2025, before moving to SMU in June 2025. She holds a B.A. from Wake Forest University and an M.S. from Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism, and is the author of Can Journalism Be Saved? Rediscovering America's Appetite for News (2010) and co-author of Mobile Disruptions (2018).