Highlights 2007
Freeman Hrabowski
General Plenary session
Friday, July 13, 2 p.m.
Freeman Hrabowski has served as president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) since May, 1992. His research and publications focus on participation and performance of African-American males.
The UMBC campus, with 12,000 students, 650 full-time faculty members, an operating budget of $300 million, and over $80 million in external contracts and grants for research and training, combines excellence in undergraduate teaching with research and graduate education in the sciences, engineering, and public policy. UMBC also actively promotes economic development in the Baltimore region, through its research, technology commercialization, and strong connections with the corporate community and public agencies.
Hrabowski serves as a consultant to the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and universities and school systems, nationally. He also sits on several corporate and civic boards. Examples include the Baltimore Museum of Art, Constellation Energy Group, France-Merrick Foundation, Marguerite Casey Foundation, McCormick & Company, Inc., Mercantile Safe Deposit & Trust Company, University of Maryland Medical System, and the Urban Institute.
Examples of recent awards and honors include being elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, receiving the prestigious McGraw Prize in Education, receiving the U.S. Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring, being named Marylander of the Year by the editors of the Baltimore Sun, and being listed among Fast Company magazine's first "Fast 50 Champions of Innovation" in business and technology. He also holds honorary degrees from a number of universities, including Duke University, the University of Illinois, Gallaudet University, the Medical University of South Carolina, and Binghamton University.
Hrabowski is coauthor of two books published by Oxford University Press, Beating the Odds: Raising Academically Successful African American Males, in 1998 and Overcoming the Odds: Raising Academically Successful African American Young Women, in 2001.
A child-leader in the Civil Rights Movement, Hrabowski was prominently featured in Spike Lee's 1997 documentary, Four Little Girls, about the racially motivated bombing, in 1963, of Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.
Born in 1950 in Birmingham, Alabama, Hrabowski graduated at the age of 19 from Hampton Institute with highest honors in mathematics. He received his M.A. in mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and four years later his Ph.D. in higher education administration/statistics, at age 24.
