Two Women Appointed to Provost Positions at State-Operated Universities

Nancy Niemi has been named provost and vice president for academic affairs at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. She will assume her new duties on July 1, 2019.

Currently, Dr. Niemi serves as director of faculty teaching initiatives at Yale University, a position she has held since 2015. From 2009 to 2015, she served as a professor, chair, and education department dean at the University of New Haven in Connecticut.

Dr. Niemi is a graduate of the University of Rochester in New York where she majored in English literature. She holds a master’s degree in education from Elmira College in New York and a doctorate in education with a concentration in curriculum and instruction from the University of Rochester.

Montserrat Fuentes has been named executive vice president and provost at the University of Iowa. She will begin her new role on June 28, 2019.

Currently, Dr. Fuentes serves as dean and professor of statistics in the College of Humanities & Sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University. Before joining the faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2016, she served as the head of the department of statistics and as the James M. Goodnight Distinguished Professor of Statistics at North Carolina State University. Prior to that, she was the director of the Network on Statistical Methods in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, a National Science Foundation-funded center to promote multi-institutional and interdisciplinary research training at the interface of statistics and atmospheric and oceanic sciences.

Dr. Fuentes is a graduate of the University of Valladolid in Spain where she earned dual bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and statistics and in music and piano. She holds a Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Chicago.