The university's board of trustees announced Gilliam, 58, will begin steering the university as its 11th president next July. Previously, the career educator had spent the past two years working as the executive vice president and provost at Ohio State.
A career educator, higher ed administrator and physician will soon lead Boston University as the school's first Black and first female president.
Gilliam's move to the East Coast is a homecoming of sorts. She graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1993 before settling in the Chicago area, where she specialized in obstetrics and gynecology. That focus inspired her subsequent research with adolescent parents and the societal factors that contribute to teen pregnancies.
"Universities produce knowledge, but they also produce knowledge in the service of others. And that idea of advancing the lives of young people and knowledge creation are core to what drives me."Gilliam's parents also featured as significant role models in her life. Her mother, Dorothy Gilliam, was the first Black woman to be hired as a reporter at the Washington Post in 1961. And her late father, Sam Gilliam, was known as an innovator in the world of abstract painting and art.
“We took this task with the utmost seriousness and with an eye toward the future of Boston University,” Antoinette “Tonie” Leatherberry, chair of the search committee and a member of BU's board of trustees, said in the university statement.
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