Biography

Marie Lynn Miranda, a leader in geospatial health informatics, took office as the 10th chancellor of the University of Illinois Chicago in July 2023. She also is a faculty member in the department of pediatrics and the department of mathematics, statistics, and computer science.

Miranda previously served as provost at Notre Dame through 2021 and was a faculty member in its applied and computational mathematics and statistics department. As provost, she led Notre Dame’s academic response to the COVID-19 pandemic; helped drive efforts to increase faculty and student diversity, resulting in the most diverse first-year class in school history in 2021; started a transformational leaders program to provide resources to students from underserved backgrounds; and led a bottom-up strategic planning process that engaged more than 600 members of the faculty.

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 — contributing to the CDC’s decision to set a more protective standard for childhood blood lead levels, developing strategies for combatting lead in drinking water, and identifying lead in aviation gasoline as a contributor to elevated blood lead levels. CEHI’s most recent work focuses on racial residential segregation and how segregated neighborhoods experience greater exposure to social and environmental stressors, which drives health and educational disparities. CEHI has moved to UIC.

Miranda brings a focus on access, equity, and excellence and a wide range of other leadership experience at Rice University, the University of Michigan, and Duke University to her role as chancellor of UIC.

Before joining Notre Dame in 2020, Miranda was provost at Rice University from 2015-19. She was responsible for all aspects of the university’s academic, research, scholarly, and creative programs, supported by a roughly $700 million annual budget. While at Rice, Miranda also led the planning and implementation of $230 million in investments focused on areas such as molecular nanotechnology, data sciences, neuroengineering, inequities and inequalities, and general research competitiveness. Her efforts at Rice also included providing a comprehensive set of programs for students from underserved backgrounds — an initiative that substantially closed graduation and time-to-degree gaps.

At Michigan, Miranda was dean of what was then the School of Natural Resources and Environment from 2012-15, restructuring the doctoral program and improving degree-completion metrics; developing data systems to support evidence-based decision-making in admissions and advising; and reinvigorating the department’s alumni relations operation.

Before her work at Michigan, Miranda spent 21 years as a member of the faculty at Duke University, including nine years as director of undergraduate programs for the Nicholas School of the Environment. She also was principal investigator of a research laboratory with roughly 30 full-time staff and 40-plus faculty collaborators. Over the course of her research career, Miranda has been the principal investigator or co-principal investigator on over $75 million in research funding.

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 a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.