Nemat Shafiq became the first woman to serve as president of Columbia University.

Columbia University announced on Wednesday that Nemat “Minush” Shafik, an economist who has served as president of the London School of Economics since 2017, will become its next president. Shafiq, 60, will become the first woman to lead an Ivy League establishment when she succeeds current President Lee Bollinger in July.

Other elite universities, including Dartmouth, Harvard and Pennsylvania, have also appointed women as their presidents in recent months.

The Board of Trustees called Shafik the “ideal candidate” in a letter to the Colombian community, calling her “a brilliant and capable world leader, community builder and outstanding economist who understands ‘higher education’ and the world beyond. .”

Shafik has extensive experience in financial institutions around the world, having served as Vice President of the World Bank, Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund and Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. She was also the first woman to become President of the London School of Economics and the first woman to become Permanent Secretary of the UK Department for International Development.

In the letter, the trustees wrote that in addition to Shafik’s accomplishments, what stood out was “her unshakable belief in the vital role that higher education institutions can and should play in tackling the world’s most complex problems.”

The Shafik family came to the US from Egypt in the 1960s when she was 4 years old and attended schools in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina before earning a bachelor’s degree in economics and politics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She then completed a master’s degree in economics from the LSE and a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Oxford.

Shafik will become president as universities wait for a Supreme Court ruling on racially sensitive university admissions and face controversy over the high cost of education and freedom of speech on campuses.

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