Harvard University’s newest president, Claudine Gay, was inaugurated Friday.
Gay is the first Black person and second woman to lead the Ivy League school. She officially started the role in July, replacing Lawrence Bacow, after previously serving as a dean.
Gay, 53, has worked at the university since 2006, and served as a dean at the university prior to her selection as president.
Gay, is the child of Haitian immigrants, who came to the United States over 50 years ago and met in New York City as students. Her mother was a registered nurse and her father was an engineer. Gay spent much of her childhood first in New York City, and then in Saudi Arabia, where her father worked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
She attended Phillips Exeter Academy, a private boarding school in Exeter, New Hampshire and then Stanford University, where she studied economics. Gay then earned her Ph.D. in 1998 from Harvard University, where she won the university’s Toppan Prize for best dissertation in political science.
After graduating, Gay served as assistant professor, then tenured associate professor in Stanford University’s Department of Political Science from 2000 to 2006. She was recruited to Harvard to be a professor of government and additionally appointed professor of African American studies in 2007.
She was appointed to her first dean’s position in 2015. Gay is regarded as a leading voice on the issue of American political participation. Among the issues she has explored is how a range of social and economic factors shape political views and voting.
She also is the founding chair of Harvard’s Inequality in America Initiative, which studies issues like the effects of child poverty and deprivation on educational opportunity and American inequality from a global perspective.
In attendance at her inauguration were her father, Sony Gay Sr., her husband, Christopher C. Afendulis, and her son, Costa Gay-Afendulis. She noted the absence of her mother, Claudette Gay, who died earlier this year.
