Dr. Freeman A. Hrabowski, President of UMBC since 1992, is a consultant on science and math education to national agencies, universities, and school systems. In 2012, he was named by President Obama to chair the President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African Americans.  He leads a university that has been recognized as a model for inclusive excellence by such publications as U.S. News, which the past 10 years has recognized UMBC as a national leader in academic innovation and undergraduate teaching. In 2012, he was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World by TIME, and more recently he received the American Council on Education’s Lifetime Achievement Award (2018), the University of California, Berkeley’s Clark Kerr Award (2019), and the University of California, San Francisco’s UCSF Medal (2020). His 2013 TED talk highlights the “Four Pillars of College Success in Science,” and his most recent book, The Empowered University, examines how university communities support academic success by cultivating an empowering institutional culture. In 2022, UMBC was classified a Research 1, or R1, institution, one of 146 doctoral universities nationally (107 public and 39 private) recognized as having “very high research activity,” and the university is the nation’s leading producer of Black bachelor’s degree recipients who go on to complete PhDs in the natural sciences and engineering, as well as MD/PhDs. Also in 2022, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) pledged $1.5 billion to support early career scientists and increase diversity in STEM through its new initiative, the Freeman Hrabowski Scholars Program