Biography

Marie Lynn Miranda, a nationally renowned leader in higher education and geospatial health informatics, became the 10th chancellor of the University of Illinois Chicago in July 2023. She also serves as a faculty member in the Department of Pediatrics and the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science. Chancellor Miranda brings a focus on access and excellence at scale across UIC’s educational, research, and clinical enterprises.

As chancellor of UIC, Miranda has aligned the university around five strategic priorities: 1) accelerating student success from recruitment to post-graduation success; 2) transforming educational programs to meet evolving student, workforce, and societal needs; 3) expanding research and innovation to strengthen discovery, translation, and societal impact; 4) amplifying and evolving the health system to enhance outcomes in patient care, health equity, and biomedical discovery; and 5) building strong partnerships with communities, businesses, and civic leaders to expand opportunity and impact. The strategic priorities are supported by two foundational efforts: 1) recruiting, retaining, and supporting world-class faculty and staff; and 2) strengthening UIC’s use of data and analytics to guide decision-making and improve outcomes. Together, the priorities and foundational efforts advance UIC’s ambitious mission to provide the broadest access to the highest levels of educational, research, and clinical excellence.

Miranda is also director of the Children’s Environmental Health Initiative (CEHI), a research, education, and outreach organization committed to fostering environments where all people can prosper. The initiative is best known for its work on childhood lead exposure. Its research contributed to the CDC’s decision to set a more protective standard for childhood blood lead levels, helped develop strategies for combating lead in drinking water, and identified lead in aviation gasoline as a contributor to elevated blood lead levels. CEHI’s most recent work focuses on how health trajectories are shaped by social and environmental stressors, with a particular focus on leveraging data from electronic health records. CEHI is now based at UIC.

Miranda extends UIC’s civic engagement and impact through active leadership in Chicago and service to national organizations working across higher education, science, health, and the environment. In Chicago, she serves on the boards of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce and the Field Museum, and on the Cook County President’s Council on Economic Advisors. She also serves on the boards or advisory bodies of the Doris Duke Foundation, Environmental Defense Fund, Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities, Hispanic Serving Research Universities, Presidents’ Alliance on Immigration and Higher Education, University Innovation Alliance, National Advisory Council for Nursing Research, and the World Economic Forum’s Global Alliance for Women’s Health.

Before joining UIC, Miranda held leadership roles at Notre Dame, Rice, and the University of Michigan. Miranda started her academic career at Duke University, where she was a faculty member for 21 years. Her national leadership has also included testimony before the U.S. Senate on strengthening the nation’s science and technology enterprise and broadening participation in STEM.

Miranda is a Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude graduate of Duke University, where she earned a bachelor’s in mathematics and economics and was named a Truman Scholar. She has a PhD and master’s from Harvard University, where she held a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Miranda is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Miranda and her husband are the proud parents of three adult children, two English Setters, and more than 1,000,000 honeybees.