Nemat Shafik, pictured at a Eurogroup assembly on the EU Council in Brussels on May 16, 2011, would be the first lady to function president of Columbia University.

Geert Vanden Wijngaert through AP

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Geert Vanden Wijngaert through AP

Nemat Shafik, pictured at a Eurogroup assembly on the EU Council in Brussels on May 16, 2011, would be the first lady to function president of Columbia University.

Geert Vanden Wijngaert through AP

Columbia University announced Wednesday that Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, an economist who has served as president of the London School of Economics since 2017, will likely be its subsequent president. Shafik, 60, would be the first lady to steer the Ivy League establishment when she replaces present president Lee Bollinger in July.

Other elite universities together with Dartmouth, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania additionally appointed ladies as their presidents in latest months.

The board of trustees referred to as Shafik “the perfect candidate” in a letter to the Columbia community, describing her as a “brilliant and able global leader, a community builder, and a preeminent economist, who understands” larger schooling “and the world beyond it.”

Shafik has intensive expertise in monetary establishments throughout the globe, serving because the World Bank’s vp, the International Monetary Fund’s deputy managing director and the Bank of England’s deputy governor. She was additionally the primary lady to be president of the London School of Economics and the primary lady to be everlasting secretary of the U.K. Department for International Development.

In the letter, the trustees wrote that what set Shafik aside past her accomplishments was “her unshakable confidence in the vital role institutions of higher education can and must play in solving the world’s most complex problems.”

Shafik’s household got here to the U.S. from Egypt within the Nineteen Sixties when she was 4 years previous, and he or she attended faculties in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina earlier than incomes her undergraduate diploma in economics and politics on the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She then earned a grasp’s diploma in economics from LSE and a Ph.D. in economics at Oxford University.

Shafik will assume the presidency as universities await Supreme Court choices involving race-conscious admissions and face controversies over the excessive value of schooling and free speech on campuses.