Cornell’s 14th president is elected

Cornell has just announced its 14th president. Martha E. Pollack, provost at the University of Michigan, has been unanimously elected by the Board of Trustees.

This coming spring, she will assume the presidency. After the death of President Elizabeth Garrett last semester, a search committee was formed, while Hunter R. Rawlings III served as Cornell’s interim president. He will continue holding this role until Pollack officially joins the Cornell community as President on April 17, 2017.

“I am humbled and honored to have been elected to lead this great university,” Pollack said. “As a private university with a public mission, Cornell is the embodiment of my own deeply held belief in the ability of knowledge to improve the human condition. I can’t wait to get started, and I look forward to meeting and working with Cornell’s outstanding faculty, students, staff and alumni in Ithaca, New York City and around the globe.”

Robert S. Harrison ’76, chairman of the board of trustees, said:

“I am delighted to welcome Martha Pollack as Cornell’s next president. She is the perfect person to take the helm of Cornell at this important moment in our history. She has successfully managed a comparably complex institution and is a bold thinker who will inspire our faculty and students in Ithaca and across all of our campuses; her academic background in computer science will serve us extremely well as we open the Cornell Tech Roosevelt Island campus next year; and her familiarity with the issues facing academic medicine will be invaluable as we continue to grow Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City.”