Vanderbilt University's planned graduate campus in West Palm Beach now has a leader on the ground, and she grew up in Palm Beach County. Natasha V. Sachs started on Oct. 5 as assistant vice chancellor and executive director of Vanderbilt University–West Palm Beach, the university announced.

Her job covers the campus from the ground up: campus development, academic planning, regional partnerships and community engagement. She is Vanderbilt's main representative in South Florida and works with government, business, civic and community leaders in West Palm Beach and across the region, while coordinating with leaders on the Nashville campus.

Who she is

Sachs spent a decade at Coursera, the online learning company, during a period when it grew from about 15 million learners to more than 200 million. There she expanded the company's university partnership business and managed a portfolio of its major university relationships. Most recently she was chief of staff to Coursera's chief content officer, working on university partnerships and artificial intelligence projects, and she set up executive AI councils that brought leaders from Vanderbilt, Stanford and the University of Michigan together with Google and Microsoft.

Before that she worked at Google in Washington, D.C., and Dublin in partnerships and digital strategy, and she began her career at NBC News in London. She holds a master's degree in politics and communication from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a graduate diploma and a bachelor's degree from Johns Hopkins University.

What the campus is meant to be

According to Vanderbilt, the West Palm Beach campus is planned for graduate education and research in finance, management, engineering, space technology and innovation, and defense technology and manufacturing, with artificial intelligence and data science built into all of it. The university expects about 1,000 graduate students a year once it is running. Executive education, workforce training, lifelong learning programs and an innovation hub are also planned, and Vanderbilt undergraduates could use the campus for semester-away programs and internships.

The academic programs are still being developed and need approval from Florida's Commission for Independent Education before classes can start.

Where things stand

Vanderbilt announced in January that it would move ahead with the campus after authorization from its Board of Trust, and it opened a new $250 million phase of fundraising. In July it named Pratim Biswas as inaugural executive director of the campus's Institute for Engineering Innovation.

The university's list of 2026 milestones includes finalizing site planning, working with the West Palm Beach City Commission and the Palm Beach County Commission to close on the land conveyed to Vanderbilt and prepare for construction, finalizing the academic plans, and holding community events and outreach. Residents can follow those steps on Vanderbilt's West Palm Beach page, which the university updates as the project moves.

Sources