Informal Intro

Newly-Named 20th President Visits UAlbany Campuses

Incoming President Havidán Rodríguez, pictured above at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, will be visiting UAlbany’s three campuses today and Tuesday. (Photo courtesy of UTRGV)

ALBANY, N.Y. (July 10, 2017) — Incoming President Havidán Rodríguez will visit the Uptown, Downtown and Health Sciences campuses today and tomorrow, July 10 and 11 – part of his preparation for taking office in mid-September.

Rodríguez, who was appointed UAlbany’s 20th president on June 21, said he wants to interact with as many different constituent groups across campus as he can during this initial tour of the campuses. He plans to visit again later this summer.

On Monday he will meet with Interim President James Stellar, Interim Provost Darrell Wheeler and their staffs, and sit in on an Executive Committee meeting. He’ll then visit some of the academic buildings on the Podium, tour the newly expanded Campus Center and meet with some incoming students during orientation programs.

On Tuesday, Rodríguez will visit the Downtown and Health Sciences campuses before returning to the Uptown campus to meet students in the University’s Educational Opportunity Program.

Rodríguez, 58, is the founding provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, a 27,000-student public university with multiple campuses throughout the Rio Grande Valley. Before that he was interim president, provost and vice president for academic affairs at The University of Texas Pan-American.

A sociologist whose research focuses on the socio-economic impacts of disasters and the economic well-being of minority populations in the United States and Puerto Rico, Rodríguez spent seven years in leadership and faculty positions at the University of Delaware, where he directed the university’s Disaster Research Center, the first social science research center in the world devoted to the study of disasters.

Rodríguez also held faculty and administrative positions at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez for over a decade. He was born in Puerto Rico, spent much of his childhood in the Bronx and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

For more news, subscribe to UAlbany's RSS headline feeds