William E. Kirwan

WILLIAM E. KIRWAN, PhD - William E. “Brit” Kirwan is chancellor emeritus of the University System of Maryland (USM). He is a nationally recognized authority on critical issues facing higher education. He served as chancellor of the University System of Maryland (USM) (2002-2015), president of the Ohio State University (1998-2002) and president of the University of Maryland, College Park (1988-1998). Prior to his presidency, he was a member of the University of Maryland mathematics faculty for 24 years. Dr. Kirwan is past chair of, among other boards, the American Council for Higher Education, the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities, the American Association of Colleges & Universities, the Business Higher Education Forum and the National Research Council Board on Higher Education and Workforce. He also served as the co-chair and chair of Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics from 2004 to 2016. Dr. Kirwan is past chair of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences, an organization comprised of the presidents of the 17 professional organizations for mathematicians. He also serves as executive director of Transforming Post-Secondary Education in Mathematics, a national reform effort to rethink what and how mathematics is taught at the collegiate level. In 2016, he was appointed by Governor Hogan and the General Assembly to chair the Commission on Innovation and Excellence in Education, which was charged to make recommendations to elevate the quality of PreK-12 education in Maryland to that of the best performing school systems in the world. Among Dr. Kirwan's many honors are the 2010 TIAA-CREF Theodore M. Hesburgh Award for Leadership Excellence and the 2009 the Carnegie Corporation Leadership Award. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002 and inducted into the Maryland’s Business and Civic Leader Hall of Fame in 2017. Dr. Kirwan received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of Kentucky and his master's and doctoral degrees in mathematics from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, in 1962 and 1964 respectively. He was married to his wife Patricia for 58 years until her passing in 2018