Ellen Marie Granberg is an American sociologist and academic administrator who became the 19th president of George Washington University on July 1, 2023.
Education
Granberg has an undergraduate bachelor's degree from the University of California at Davis. She earned her master's and Ph.D. degrees from Vanderbilt University.[1] Her doctoral thesis was on self identity based on health outcomes[2] According to Google Scholar, her research has been cited a total of 2,136 times and she has an h-index of 15 (i.e., 15 publications cited at least 15 times each).[3] Her work has been on microsocial phenomenon on the self image, the identity, the well-being and ultimately the mental health of society but particularly of children.[4]
Career
In the 1980s and 1990s, Granberg served in the telecommunications industry at the Fortune 500 firm Pacific Bell and AT&T.[5] She has been an academic administrator for over 25 years and first started her career in academia as a professor of sociology at Clemson University where she worked on nutrition science and obesity.[6] She spent seventeen years at Clemson before moving to Rochester Institute of Technology where she was named provost in 2018.[7] She became the first female provost and senior vice president for Academic Affairs at Rochester Institute of Technology.[5] She is credited for expanding doctoral education and creating new facilities for instruction and research at Rochester Institute of Technology.[8] In addition to expanding doctoral education and research, Granberg co-led the formation of RIT Certified, which aimed to promote professional mobility. It has a portfolio of alternative education courses, certificate programs and skill-based learning experiences.[9]
In 2023 Granberg was named as the incoming president of George Washington University, the first woman to hold the position of president at the university; Granberg started on July 2, 2023.[1][10] After a decision by the Atlantic 10 Conference that they would relocate to Washington, D.C. in November 2023, Granberg announced that the men's basketball championships would be hosted by GW in 2025.[11]
After the October 7th attack on Israel by Palestine, GW gained national attention after students associated with the Palestinian liberation movement projected "glory to our martyrs" onto Gelman Library. The student group, Students for Justice in Palestine, was suspended for 90 days after the incident. [12] Granberg condemned what she called a "celebration of terrorism." This created outrage from SJP, saying Granberg's view was racist and Islamophobic [13] GW has the 4th largest university Jewish populations in the United States, at 30% of students.[14]
