Dr. Freeman A. Hrabowski, President of University of Maryland, Baltimore County since 1992, graduated from Hampton Institute and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He also holds honorary degrees from over 40 colleges and universities. 

In 2012, he was named by President Obama to chair the President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African Americans. He leads a university that has been recognized as a model for inclusive excellence by such publications as U.S. News, which the past 10 years has recognized UMBC as a national leader in academic innovation and undergraduate teaching. UMBC recently became one of only 146 higher education institutions to achieve the Carnegie Classification of doctoral universities with very high research.

Dr. Hrabowski was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World by TIME magazine in 2012, and more recently he received the American Council on Education’s Lifetime Achievement Award (2018), the University of California, Berkeley’s Clark Kerr Award (2019), the University of California, San Francisco’s UCSF Medal (2020), 

The Empowered University, Dr. Hrabowski’s most recent book, examines how university communities support academic success by cultivating an empowering institutional culture. In 2022, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for development of a national educational model for students with diverse backgrounds to excel in engineering and science (2022).