FARMINGTON — Excitement was in the air on the campus of the University of Maine at Farmington on Wednesday as a new president was named.

Kathryn Foster, a former policy director at the University at Buffalo and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., will take the helm July 1.

“She has a combination of skills and experience that’s a good fit, good for UMF, Farmington, Western Maine, the region, as well as Maine as a whole,” retiring President Theodora Kalikow said. “It’s going to be a good, new chapter.”

Foster called it a “red-letter day” as word spread of her appointment and friends responded.

“I’m ecstatic,” she said. “It’s a deep honor.”

University of Maine System Chancellor James H. Page announced that the board of trustees had approved his recommendation of Foster for UMF and Linda K. Schott for the position of president of the Presque Isle campus.

Foster said she was drawn to UMF because of the school’s reputation for excellence in academics and its commitment to the success and development of students.

“I was also drawn through the mutually supportive campus-region relationship, an intimate tie between the local region and the campus, a sense of community off and on campus,” she said.

She was “won over by the generosity, wisdom, creative energy and the compelling aspirations of an outstanding faculty, staff, students and community leaders,” she said.

Foster is a one-year visiting fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, a social sciences “think tank,” for which she has researched and written about the governance of cross-state regions.

During her time at the University at Buffalo, Foster was a senior fellow and director of its Regional Institute, a major research and policy unit of the State University of New York.

While there, she developed skills in strategic planning, team building, fundraising, working with the media and governance, she said.

As a university president, she aspires to fulfill her commitment to higher education, and she has a few goals in mind: increasing the visibility of the campus, and working with media and marketing to let people know about the tremendous work being done on campus.

She’s also committed to fundraising and exploring new revenue streams, something higher education hasn’t had to do previously, she said.

She said it’s an exciting time to be president, as UMF nears its 150th anniversary in 2014. Her early days will be spent getting to know the campus and learning about Maine.

Foster graduated from Johns Hopkins University and earned a doctorate from Princeton University. She served two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Kingdom of Swaziland.

After 18 years at the helm, Kalikow will move to Mount Vernon at the end of June where she plans to garden and be involved in other outdoor activities while doing some special projects for the university system, she said.

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