WILLIAM E. KIRWAN, PhD – William E. “Brit” Kirwan is chancellor emeritus of the University System of Maryland (USM). He is a nationally recognized authority on critical issues facing higher education. He served as chancellor of the University System of Maryland (2002-2015), president of the Ohio State University (1998-2002), and president of the University of Maryland, College Park (1988-1998). Before his presidency, he was a member of the University of Maryland mathematics faculty for 24 years.

Dr. Kirwan is past chair of, among other boards, the American Council for Higher Education, the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities, the American Association of Colleges & Universities, the Business Higher Education Forum, the National Research Council Board on Higher Education and Workforce, and the University of Maryland Medical Center. He also served as the co-chair and chair of Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics from 2004 to 2016.

In 2016, Dr. Kirwan was asked by the General Assembly and Governor Larry Hogan to chair the Commission on Innovation and Excellence, charged with developing recommendations that would enable Maryland PreK-12 schools to perform at the level of the best-performing school systems in the world. The Commission’s recommendations were encapsulated in a bill, The Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, which was enacted in 2021. This bill will lead to significant reforms in Maryland’s public school system and increase the state’s investment in its schools by more than $4 billion by the end of the
10-year implementation period. Dr. Kirwan currently serves as Vice Chair of the state’s Accountability and Implementation Board, which oversees the implementation of the Blueprint.

Among Dr. Kirwan’s many honors is the 2010 TIAA-CREF Theodore M. Hesburgh Award for Leadership Excellence. Considered one of the nation’s top higher education honors, this award recognizes outstanding leadership in higher education and contributions to the greater good. In 2009, he received the Carnegie Corporation Leadership Award, which included a $500,000 grant to support USM academic priorities, and in 2025, he was named as the recipient of the Peter McPherson Lifetime Achievement Award by the Association of Public and Land Grant Colleges.

Dr. Kirwan was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002 and inducted into the Baltimore Sun’s Maryland Business and Civic Hall of Fame in 2017. He is the recipient of both the Maryland Senate’s First Citizen Award (1998) and the Maryland House of Representatives Speaker’s Medallion (2007). He has received honorary degrees from the Ohio State University (2003), the University of Kentucky (2012), and Johns Hopkins University (2015) and has been inducted into the Alumni Hall of Fame at the University of Kentucky and Rutgers University.

Dr. Kirwan received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Kentucky in 1960 and his master’s and doctoral degrees in mathematics from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, in 1962 and 1964 respectively.