Historian, anthropologist, and former Berkeley Chancellor now leading one of America’s oldest scientific institutions.
Nicholas B. Dirks is a widely respected historian and anthropologist and a prominent leader in higher education. Since 2020 he has been President and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences, founded in 1817 to advance scientific research, education, and policy. He served as the 10th Chancellor of UC Berkeley from 2012 to 2017, where he launched a Division of Data Science and global partnerships including the Tsinghua Berkeley Shenzhen Institute. Earlier he was Executive Vice President for the Arts and Sciences and Dean of the Faculty at Columbia. A Guggenheim and MacArthur fellow, he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His latest book, City of Intellect, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2024.