Lawrence S Bacow

Lawrence S. Bacow will become the 29th president of Harvard University on July 1 2018. Bacow served as the 12th president of Tufts Univresity from September 2001 through July 2011. Currently the Hauser Leader-in-Residence at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Center for Public Leadership, Bacow served with for 10 years as President of Tufts University. Bacow’s decade of leadership at Tufts followed 24 years on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he served as chancellor, chair of the faculty, and the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies. A native of Pontiac, Mich., and the son of immigrants, he attended college at MIT and went on to earn three degrees from Harvard, including a Ph.D. in public policy. Following his decade at Tufts, Bacow came to Harvard in 2011 as president-in-residence at the Graduate School of Education (GSE), while also becoming a member of the Harvard Corporation, the University’s principal governing board. In 2014, he moved from the GSE to the Harvard Kennedy School. The son of immigrant parents – his father a refugee from the pogroms of Eastern Europe, his mother a survivor of Auschwitz – Bacow has long been devoted to education’s vital role in enabling pursuit of the American dream. Growing up in Michigan, he took an avid interest in science and mathematics, and won acceptance to MIT. He received his S.B. in economics there in 1972, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. He went on to earn three degrees from Harvard, a J.D. and M.P.P in 1976, and a Ph.D. in public policy in 1978. Bacow is married to Adele Fleet Bacow, an urban planner and graduate of Wellesley College and MIT.