Math for America President Maria Klawe to Deliver Dartmouth Engineering Investiture Address

Marie Klawe, president of Math for America, will deliver Thayer's 2026 Investiture address. (Photo courtesy of Harvey Mudd College)

At Investiture, Klawe will also receive the Robert Fletcher Award, Dartmouth Engineering's highest honor, given annually in recognition of distinguished scientific achievement and service in the highest tradition of the School.

Klawe was the first woman to serve as president of Harvey Mudd College, a premier liberal arts college of engineering, science, and mathematics. During her 17-year tenure at Harvey Mudd, she gained national recognition for her leadership in increasing the diversity and caliber of students at the College. When Klawe arrived in 2006, women made up 30 percent of the student body; by the time she left in 2023, that figure had reached 50 percent. Over the same period, the percentage of Black students grew from roughly one to seven percent, and Hispanic students from five to 20 percent.

Currently, as president of Math for America, Klawe is leading national efforts to strengthen K–12 STEM education through the recruitment, support, and retention of outstanding math and science teachers in public schools across the country.

"Few have done more than Maria Klawe to advance STEM education while ensuring more people have a place in it," said Douglas Van Citters '99 Th'03 Th'06, interim dean of engineering at Dartmouth. "She has led engineering and STEM institutions that deeply value the liberal arts and has spent her career working to transform how we teach math and science, at every level, to engage and inspire new generations of engineers and scientists. We are honored to welcome her to Investiture this June."

Prior to joining Harvey Mudd, Klawe served as dean of engineering and professor of computer science at Princeton University, and has served in various leadership roles at the University of British Columbia, including as dean of science and head of the department of computer science. She earned her PhD and BSc in mathematics from the University of Alberta.

An accomplished researcher, Klawe has made significant contributions across mathematics and computer science, including foundational work in discrete mathematics, theoretical computer science, and human-computer interaction.

Klawe is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among her many honors, she is a recipient of the 2017 Academic Leadership Award from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian Association of Computer Science, and was named one of the World's 50 Greatest Leaders by Fortune magazine in 2014 for her leadership in bringing more women into science, technology, and engineering.