C. L. Max Nikias currently serves as executive vice president and provost at the University of Southern California. He is the second-ranking officer under President Sample. Over the course of his career as a researcher, educator, and university administrator, he has earned acclaim for his leadership, innovation, and fundraising, as well as his commitment to advancing university-wide education in the arts and humanities. Having served as USC’s chief academic officer since June 2005, he is charged with accelerating the academic momentum that the university has experienced in recent years.

At USC, Nikias oversees a vast academic community, consisting of the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, the Keck School of Medicine, and 16 professional schools, as well as the divisions of Student Affairs, Libraries, Information Technology Services, Student Religious Life, and Enrollment Services. He was instrumental in bringing the Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education—with its repository of 52,000 testimonies of Holocaust survivors—and the Edward R. Roybal Institute on Applied Gerontology to the university, and he established the Stevens Institute for Innovation at USC. He also launched Visions and Voices, an arts and humanities initiative, as well as a grant program to advance scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. He currently enjoys teaching freshman students on ancient Athenian democracy and drama.

The university recently identified the elevation of its Keck School of Medicine as one of its top academic priorities, given the growing importance of the medical and biological sciences in the 21st century. Nikias recruited a new dean to the Keck School of Medicine, spearheaded the integration of the school’s 19 Faculty Practice Plans, and oversaw the transfer of the University Hospital and Norris Cancer Center from Tenet Healthcare Corporation to USC. This marked a major milestone in USC medicine’s 127-year history: the university now has fiduciary control over the Keck School of Medicine, as well as all clinical operations, consisting of the Faculty Practice Plans and the university hospitals. The dean of the Keck School of Medicine and the CEO of the university hospitals report to the provost. In addition, Nikias currently chairs the USC Hospitals Governing Board, which oversees both the University Hospital and the Norris Cancer Center, and a combined total of 471 beds.

Nikias joined USC’s faculty in 1991 and currently holds the Malcolm R. Currie Chair in Technology and the Humanities. From 2001 to 2005, he served as dean of the Viterbi School of Engineering. During his tenure, the school staked out a consistent position as a top-tier engineering school. He oversaw the expansion of its biomedical engineering program and its distance learning program, making it the largest graduate engineering degrees program in the country. He also established key partnerships with a number of corporations, including Airbus, Boeing, Chevron, Northrop Grumman, and Pratt and Whitney, and led a fundraising campaign that brought more than $250 million in gifts and new endowment, including an historic $52 million school naming gift from Andrew and Erna Viterbi.

Over his two-decade career as an active scholar, Nikias was internationally recognized for his pioneering research on digital signal processing and communications, digital media systems, and biomedicine. He was the founding director of two national research centers at USC: the NSF Engineering Research Center on Integrated Media Systems and the Department of Defense (DoD) Center for Research on Applied Signal Processing. He served as a senior consultant to a range of corporations and has been a high-level consultant to the United States government, holding a security clearance for fifteen years. His innovations and patents have been adopted by the DoD in sonar, radar, and communication systems. He authored more than 275 journal articles or papers, three textbooks, and eight patents, and has mentored more than 30 Ph.D. and postdoctoral students.

Nikias is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He was the recipient of the IEEE Simon Ramo Medal, the University at Buffalo’s Clifford C. Furnas Memorial Award, the American Hellenic Council’s Aristeio Award, and the USC Black Alumni Association’s Thomas Kilgore Service Award. Three of his publications received Best Paper awards, and he is a Fellow of the IEEE, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the California Council on Science and Technology. The U.S. State Department awarded him a certificate of appreciation, and the California Governor honored him with a formal commendation for cutting-edge research. He currently serves on the Board of Trustees of the Chadwick School, an independent K-12 school on California’s Palos Verdes Peninsula.

Nikias graduated with honors from the Famagusta Gymnasium, a school that emphasized sciences, history, and Greco-Roman classics. He received a diploma from the National Technical University of Athens, sometimes simply known as National Metsovion Polytechnic, the oldest and most prestigious higher education institution of Greece, and earned an M.S. and Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo. The University of Cyprus awarded him an honorary doctorate.

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