José Luis Cruz Rivera

José Luis Cruz Rivera is the President of Northern Arizona University. He is also a Professor of Electrical Engineering at NAU. Prior to joining NAU in 2021, Dr. Cruz Rivera served as President of The City University of New York’s (CUNY) Herbert H. Lehman College (Bronx, NY) and as Executive Vice Chancellor and University Provost of the 25-campus, 500,000-student CUNY system—the world’s largest urban university. Previously, Cruz Rivera served as provost of California State University, Fullerton. He is a former vice president of Higher Education Policy and Practice at The Education Trust in Washington, DC and a former Chief Student Affairs Officer for the University of Puerto Rico system. He began his career as a faculty member in engineering at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, rising through the ranks and serving as chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and dean of Academic Affairs. A leading national advocate for equitable educational policies, Cruz Rivera has testified several times before the US Congress, and his work has been funded by federal, state, and philanthropic organizations including the National Science Foundation, Lumina Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the US Department of Education, among others. He earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, and his master’s and doctorate degrees from the Georgia Institute of Technology, specializing in optical interconnections for ultracompact massively parallel processing systems.