Next level visionaries

Dr. Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, President Emeritus of UMBC (The University of Maryland, Baltimore County) served as president from 1992 to 2022. His research and publications focus on science and math education, with special emphasis on minority participation and performance. He chaired the National Academies’ committee that produced the 2011 report, Expanding Underrepresented Minority Participation: America’s Science and Technology Talent at the Crossroads. He was named in 2012 by President Obama to chair the President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African Americans. His 2013 TED talk highlights the “Four Pillars of College Success in Science.”  In 2022, Dr. Hrabowski was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and he was also named the inaugural ACE Centennial Fellow, to be served upon his retirement from UMBC. In addition, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) launched the Freeman Hrabowski Scholars Program ($1.5 billion) to help build a scientific workforce that more fully reflects our increasingly diverse country. In October 2022, he was named the inaugural Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Lecture Speaker by Harvard University. In April 2023, The National Academy of Sciences awarded him the Public Welfare Medal, the Academy’s most prestigious award, and inducted him as a member of the academy, for his extraordinary use of science for the public good.

In 2008, he was named one of America’s Best Leaders by U.S. News & World Report, which ranked UMBC the nation’s #1 “Up and Coming” university for six years (2009-14). For the past seven years (2015-21), U.S. News ranked UMBC in the top ten on a list of the nation’s “most innovative” national universities. For the past 10 years, U.S. News also consistently ranked UMBC among the nation’s leading institutions for “Best Undergraduate Teaching.”  TIME magazine named him one of America’s 10 Best College Presidents in 2009, and one of the“100 Most Influential People in the World” in 2012.  In 2011, he received both the TIAA-CREF Theodore M. Hesburgh Award for Leadership Excellence and the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s Academic Leadership Award, recognized by many as the nation’s highest awards among higher education leaders.  Also in 2011, he was named one of seven Top American Leaders by The Washington Post and the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership.  In 2012, he received the Heinz Award for his contributions to improving the “Human Condition” and was among the inaugural inductees into the U.S. News & World Report STEM Solutions Leadership Hall of Fame. More recently, he received the American Council on Education’s Lifetime Achievement Award (2018), was named a recipient of the University of California, Berkeley’s Clark Kerr Award (2019), and awarded the University of California, San Francisco’s UCSF Medal (2020).

He serves as a consultant to the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Academies, and universities and school systems nationally. He also serves on the boards of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, France-Merrick Foundation, T. Rowe Price Group, McCormick & Company, and the Baltimore Equitable Society. He served previously on the boards of the Marguerite Casey Foundation (Chair), The Urban Institute, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Maryland Humanities Council (member and Chair).

Examples of other honors include election to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS), the National Academy of Public Administration, and the American Philosophical Society; receiving the prestigious McGraw Prize in Education, the U.S. Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring, the Columbia University Teachers College Medal for Distinguished Service, the GE African American Forum ICON Lifetime Achievement Award, the American Educational Research Association’s Distinguished Public Service Award, Black Engineer of the Year(BEYA) by the BEYA STEM Global Competitiveness Conference, Educator of the Year by the World Affairs Council of Washington, DC, and Marylander of the Year by the editors of the Baltimore Sun; and being listed among Fast Company magazine’s first Fast 50 Champions of Innovation in business and technology, and receiving the Technology Council of Maryland’s Lifetime Achievement Award.  He also holds honorary degrees from more than 45 institutions – including Harvard, Princeton, and Duke to the University of Michigan, University of North Carolina, Johns Hopkins University, and Georgetown University.

With philanthropist Robert Meyerhoff, he co-founded the Meyerhoff Scholars Program in 1988. The program is open to all high-achieving students committed to pursuing advanced degrees and research careers in science and engineering, and advancing underrepresented minorities in these fields. The program is recognized as a national model, and based on program outcomes, Hrabowski has authored numerous articles and co-authored two books, Beating the Odds and Overcoming the Odds (Oxford University Press), focusing on parenting and high-achieving African American males and females in science. His 2015 book, Holding Fast to Dreams: Empowering Youth from the Civil Rights Crusade to STEM Achievement (Beacon Press), describes the events and experiences that played a central role in his development as an educator and leader. The Empowered University: Shared Leadership, Culture Change, and Academic Success (Johns Hopkins University Press), the 2019 book he wrote with two colleagues, examines how university communities support academic success by cultivating an empowering institutional culture.

A child-leader in the Civil Rights Movement, Hrabowski was prominently featured in Spike Lee’s 1997 documentary, Four Little Girls, on the racially motivated bombing in 1963 of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

Born in 1950 in Birmingham, Alabama, Hrabowski graduated from Hampton Institute with highest honors in mathematics. He received his M.A. (mathematics) and Ph.D. (higher education administration/statistics) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.