Four candidates will visit campus, interview for provost position

Four candidates for the position of provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs will visit Grand Valley in late January for open meetings.

The candidates are briefly profiled below. More information about each person can be found online at gvsu.edu/provostsearch.

Students, faculty and staff members are invited to participate in these open meetings and provide feedback. Each candidate will give a presentation that can also be viewed by Zoom webinar, and will be available the following day for coffee and conversations on the Pew Grand Rapids Campus.

Candidates are listed below, in order of their meeting times. All presentations will be given in the Kirkhof Center, Pere Marquette Room; coffee and conversation meetings will be held at the DeVos Center, Regency Room (102E). The Zoom link will be the same for all meetings and posted on the Provost Search website. 

Alan Shoho is the former dean of the School of Education and professor of administrative leadership at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He served in that capacity for 10 years.

Before UWM, Shoho worked at the University of Texas at San Antonio as professor of educational leadership and associate vice provost for Academic and Faculty Support. He was an American Council of Education fellow during the 2012-2013 academic year at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. 

Shoho earned a bachelor's degree from California State University at Fullerton, master's degree from the University of Hawaii and a doctorate from Arizona State University.

Fatma Mili is the dean of and professor in the College of Computing and Informatics at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. With nearly 4,000 students, it is one of the largest colleges of computing in the country and the fastest growing college in the UNC system.

Mili had worked at Oakland University as chair of computer science and engineering and acting associate dean of the School of Engineering. She then moved to Purdue University as department head of computer information technology, then associate dean for educational research and development, then executive director of the TransSTEM Center.

She earned a doctorate from the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, France.

Robert Aguirre serves as dean of the College of Arts and Letters and professor of English at James Madison University, a regional, public university in Virginia.

At JMU, Aguirre leads 270 tenured and tenure-track faculty in 10 academic units and several interdisciplinary centers that educate more than 3,500 undergraduate and graduate students in 50 majors, minors and certificates. He had worked at Wayne State University for 21 years as a faculty member and, later, associate dean in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Aguirre earned a bachelor's degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a doctorate from Harvard.

Chaden Djalali is a professor of physics and astronomy at Ohio University and an international expert in nuclear and hadronic physics. Before returning to teaching at OU, Djalali served as executive vice president for Academic Affairs and provost.

Djalali has served as dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Iowa, overseeing 800 faculty members in a college that enrolled 18,600 undergraduate and graduate students. At the University of South Carolina, Djalali served as Carolina distinguished professor and chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

Djalali earned bachelor's and master's degrees in physics from the University of Paris XI and two doctoral degrees from the Institut de Physique Nucléaire d’Orsay in France.