Presidential Search Announcements

Dear College Community:

I am pleased to share with you that the Harvey Mudd College Board of Trustees has unanimously elected Harriet Nembhard as the sixth president of the College. A nationally respected leader in the field of industrial and operations engineering, Harriet currently serves as dean of the College of Engineering at University of Iowa. She will assume the presidency on July 1, 2023.

Throughout her extraordinary career, Harriet has served as a leading voice on the national level for transforming undergraduate STEM education. Her research into co-curricular STEM education and its role in undergraduate identity formation received National Science Foundation funding, and she was invited by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to serve as a member of their joint roundtable on advancing change in undergraduate STEM education.

Harriet is very familiar with The Claremont Colleges consortium. She earned her bachelor’s degree in management at Claremont McKenna College and served as an alumna trustee of CMC for three years. In addition, she served on the advisory board for CMC’s new integrated sciences center, working with former HMC Computer Science Professor Ran Libeskind-Hadas. 

She and her husband, David, will be making trips to the Claremont area over the coming months as they prepare to move to Southern California. We will look for opportunities for Harriet and David to meet with the Harvey Mudd community so that they can both begin to connect with us on a personal level. For now, you can learn more about Harriet via the College’s Presidential Search website.

I would like to express my thanks to the members of the Presidential Search Committee as well as to the countless faculty, staff, students, alumni, parents and friends who have engaged with this process, whether by providing input into the position description through surveys or by meeting with the final candidates to provide your feedback.

We are delighted that Harriet will join us as the next president of Harvey Mudd College, and we look forward to welcoming both Harriet and David to The Claremont Colleges community in the coming weeks and months.

Sincerely,

Jim Bean ’77 Chair, HMC Board of Trustees