Chancellor Nancy Cantor (GS5A)
Chancellor, Rutgers University – Newark, USA.
Widening participation in research and innovation: lessons from initiatives in the USA (download presentation here 
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Topic A: Benefits of STEM diversity in operation
Nancy Cantor PhD is Chancellor of Rutgers University – Newark, a post she assumed in January 2014. A distinguished leader in higher education, she is recognized nationally and internationally as an advocate for re-emphasizing its public mission. This entails a view of the university not as a traditional "ivory tower," but as a public good, an anchor institution that collaborates with partners from all sectors of the economy to fulfill higher education’s promise as an engine of discovery, innovation, and social mobility.
Prior to her current position, Cantor was Chancellor and President of Syracuse University, where she led multi-faceted initiatives that built on the universities historical strengths, pursuing cross-sector collaborations in the City of Syracuse that simultaneously enrich scholarship and education, spurring transformation of this older industrial city. These local engagements in key areas—such as environmental sustainability; art, technology, and design; neighborhood and cultural entrepreneurship; and urban school reform—resonate nationally and globally, demonstrating the impact and importance of engaged scholarship and the inter-connectedness of the pressing issues of our world. The breadth, depth, and success of these efforts earned Chancellor Cantor the 2008 Carnegie Corporation Academic Leadership Award. Previously, Cantor was chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at the University of Michigan and senior research scientist at the Institute for Social Research, and chair of the department of psychology at Princeton University. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, Cantor is a board member of the American Institutes for Research and the New York Academy of Sciences, co-chair of the American Commonwealth Partnership’s Presidents Council, and a member of the Steering Committee of the Anchor Institutions Task Force. Chancellor Cantor lectures and writes extensively on the role of universities as anchor institutions in their communities, along with other crucial issues in higher education such as rewarding public scholarship, sustainability, liberal education and the creative campus, the status of women in the academy, and racial justice and diversity.