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Gregory Crawford Named Miami University's 22nd President

Jeff Sabo
/
Miami University
Gregory Crawford meeting with students and staff during a forum prior to Friday's vote.

Miami University's 22nd president will be Gregory Crawford. He'll take over in July for David Hodge, who's retiring.

Miami's board of trustees voted unamimously to approve Crawford's nomination Friday morning.

He is currently a Professor of Physics and Vice President and Associate Provost at the University of Notre Dame, where he has also served as the William K. Warren Foundation Dean of Notre Dame’s College of Science. You can read Crawford's full curriculum vitae here.

During a forum earlier this week, Crawford was asked about the city of Oxford and Miami relations, the next big thing in higher education, and how he would improve diversity at the university.

"I'll work with each unit to put in place, and have them think exclusively about how they can embrace diversity," he responded. "Both on the biggest grand plan of how to improve it, to even some of the smaller things that will help improve on the cultural side of things and bringing in people from diverse backgrounds."

Crawford says the university should also consider partnerships with historically black universities and colleges and other outside institutions.

And the next big thing in higher ed? "It's big data and analytics," he said. "It's exponentially increasing in terms of the data that we have available to us today. It helps us make decisions. It gives us insights that we never had before. It does all kinds of different things, especially if you look at what machine learning is doing today and what it can learn, and cognitive computing and how that's going to be able to influence (things). So I think we have to be ready for this era."

Crawford is an Ohio native with a bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics, a master’s in physics and a doctorate in chemical physics, all from Kent State University.

He says Miami feels like a good fit. "It's a great place, actually, for me personally because I really resonate with what the faculty and students do, not just at the leadership level but everything everyone else is doing."

President David Hodge is set to retire June 30, 2016.
 

Senior Editor and reporter at WVXU with more than 20 years experience in public radio; formerly news and public affairs producer with WMUB. Would really like to meet your dog.