Access to higher education has been a critical part of the American fabric. Those who lead institutions of higher education have the unique opportunity “to look carefully at all the threads that are a part of that fabric and contribute toward strengthening what that fabric is able to do,” says Marie Lynn Miranda, who was named Rice University’s Howard R. Hughes Provost, effective July 1.
Her primary appointment will be in the Department of Statistics at Rice. Miranda’s parents were immigrants from Goa, a former Portuguese colony on the Indian subcontinent. Through her family, she saw the American dream realized through higher education at an early age. Her father came to the United States to attend school and became a professor at the University of Detroit. While caring for their children, her parents sponsored relatives to come to the U.S. to pursue their educational aspirations as well.
“They felt very strongly that education was how we became our best selves and was how we figured out how to serve the world,” she says. Miranda attended Duke University, where she studied mathematics—a field she was drawn to because of its philosophical and theoretical components. An interest in the human dimensions of environmental problems drove her to double major in economics.
In 1985, she graduated from Duke and continued to pursue economics at Harvard—an experience Miranda says proved to be challenging yet gratifying. “It was hard intellectually in a way that you felt great how it was making your brain work—like you can just feel yourself getting better at working on hard things,” she says.
Graduating in 1988, she continued at Harvard and received a Ph.D. in economics, where her dissertation focused on how economic and social policies affect positive land management decisions.
With a strong academic footing, Miranda realized that her research and skill set could have launched a career for her in a number of settings—government agencies, think tanks, consulting firms—but she chose to pursue a career in higher education.
In 1990, she joined the faculty at Duke University and spent years in various positions teaching and leading, first beginning as an assistant professor in public policy.
