Marie Lynn Miranda began her tenure as Charles and Jill Fischer Provost of the University of Notre Dame on July 1, 2020, the fifth provost at Notre Dame since the position was established in 1970. The University’s second-ranking officer, the provost is elected by the Board of Trustees and, at the direction of the president, exercises overall responsibility for the academic enterprise.
A distinguished scholar in the field of children’s environmental health, Miranda is especially well-known for her research on childhood lead exposure. She served as provost at Rice University from 2015–19 and as dean of the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources and Environment for the four years prior to that.
In addition to her responsibilities as provost, Miranda is a professor of applied and computational mathematics and statistics at Notre Dame, maintaining an active research portfolio. She is a leader in the rapidly evolving field of geospatial health informatics and is the founding director of the Children’s Environmental Health Initiative (CEHI), a research, education, and outreach program committed to fostering environments where all people can prosper. Her interest in the joint effects of social and environmental exposures has led her to study the impact on health of racial residential segregation in particular.
Miranda spent the first 21 years of her academic career on the faculty at Duke University, her alma mater, during which time she won the university’s top teaching award and founded CEHI.
An elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of Sigma Xi, she is an adjunct professor of pediatrics at Duke as well as Baylor College of Medicine. She sits on the boards of the Environmental Defense Fund and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and has provided extensive service to the NIH.
Miranda graduated Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude from Duke with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and economics and was named a Truman Scholar. She received her master’s and doctorate from Harvard University, where she held a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Her father, Constancio Miranda, earned his master’s in civil engineering from Notre Dame in 1962.
Sponsored by the Environmental Change Initiative.