C. L. Max Nikias
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Chrysostomos L. Max Nikias has served as provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at the University of Southern California since June 2005. Over the course of his career as a researcher, educator, and university administrator, Nikias has earned acclaim for his leadership, innovation, and fundraising, as well as his ability to build partnerships among varied constituencies.
As USC’s chief academic officer and second-ranking officer under President Steven B. Sample, Nikias is charged with accelerating the academic momentum that the university has experienced in recent years. This effort is focused on cross-disciplinary scholarship, international collaboration, socially beneficial innovation, community service, and the use of the arts and humanities as educational tools for students outside of the arts. He also supports the president in fundraising efforts for the university’s academic programs.
He oversees a vast academic community, comprising USC’s undergraduate college, graduate college, the USC Keck School of Medicine, and 15 professional schools, as well as the divisions of Student Affairs, Student Religious Life, Information Technology Services, and Enrollment Services. As provost, he serves as the chair of the USC Keck School of Medicine Clinical Operations Oversight Committee.
A passionate advocate for the arts and classical education, Nikias launched Visions and Voices, an arts and humanities initiative, in 2005. To provide maximum educational advantage through USC’s renowned constellation of arts programs and through partnerships with Los Angeles’ cultural organizations, the initiative features film festivals, theatrical plays, humanities lectures, exhibitions, and musical and other performances. Each event is accompanied by organized discussions or reflective components, to help students from every discipline to gain new perspectives and to consider the timeless values inherent within the artwork or performance.
Nikias also established the USC Levan Institute for Humanities and Ethics. The institute, made possible by a gift from Dr. Norman Levan, organizes and issues a grand challenge to every new USC student: to engage with, understand, and be informed by the timeless values at the core of our humanity.
Working with faculty and deans, Nikias has created numerous other initiatives and programs, including:
- a grant program for advancing scholarship in the humanities and social sciences;
- major initiatives in highly interdisciplinary research areas, such as nanosciences, new energy sources, and biomedical imaging;
- an internationalization initiative that prepares students for lives in a global marketplace, and that benefits the academic community through transcontinental alliances in research, education, and community service;
- a first-of-its-kind, cross-disciplinary academic institute examining all facets of the evolving U.S.-China relationship;
- an undergraduate education initiative to offer students both the resources of a large university and the personal attention found at a small college;
- a university-wide venture to jump-start distance-learning and continuing-education activities at all USC schools;
- a pioneering general education initiative in multimedia literacy that can equip every student with state-of-the art educational and communication tools;
- a transformation of traditional and new information services, including a federated information-technology approach that is being emulated at other top universities;
- and a diversity hiring initiative that emphasizes the additional recruitment of outstanding women and minority candidates to the USC faculty (this initiative was spotlighted in a major Chronicle of Higher Education feature).
Working with the Roybal family, Nikias established the USC Edward R. Roybal Institute on Applied Gerontology, to address interdisciplinary research and education programs.
Nikias was also instrumental in negotiating on behalf of the university the relocation of the Shoah Foundation—originally established by filmmaker and USC trustee Steven Spielberg—and the establishment of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. The Shoah Foundation’s repository of 52,000 testimonies of Holocaust survivors has been transferred to USC in perpetuity; this unique material, representing the world’s largest digital library, allows USC to significantly advance scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.
Nikias has taken steps to make USC a pacesetter in translating discoveries into timely innovation that can meet society’s most pressing needs. He worked to establish the USC Stevens Institute, made possible by a gift from USC Trustee Mark Stevens and directed by a longtime MIT innovation-development expert. USC Stevens is helping faculty and students from every discipline to develop new ideas and cutting-edge research for the benefit of society.
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[edit] Deanship Tenure
Nikias joined USC’s faculty in 1991 and was named dean of the Viterbi School of Engineering in 2001. During his deanship, the school staked out a consistent position as a top-ten engineering school according to traditional measures, while simultaneously charting a course as an academic leader in emerging, nontraditional metrics.
Nikias recruited 30 world-class faculty members to the school and also tripled the number of women on the faculty. He also led an effort to develop a new engineering curriculum that could attract and retain more top young minds—leading to an increase in student diversity and quality.
A skilled builder of bridges between academia, industry, and government, he played key roles in bringing several major research institutes to USC before and during his deanship. Nikias was the founding director of two national research centers at USC: the National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Research Center (ERC) on Integrated Media Systems and the Department of Defense Center for Research on Applied Signal Processing (CRASP).
He has also supported an expanded role for USC’s acclaimed Information Sciences Institute, and worked with faculty across the university to establish an additional NSF ERC in Biomimetics, as well as the Department of Homeland Security’s first Research Center of Excellence. He also built research partnerships with major corporations such as Pratt & Whitney, Chevron, and Airbus, and prestigious universities such as the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur and China’s Tsinghua University.
Nikias led fundraising efforts that brought more than $220 million in gifts and new endowment to the engineering school during his four-year tenure as dean. A historic $52 million naming gift from Andrew and Erna Viterbi in 2004 drew worldwide attention. Two departments within the school also received major naming gifts—the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering.
His leadership efforts made possible a significant update and expansion of the school’s physical plant, most notably the 103,000 square-foot Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering.
Nikias led the transformation of the school’s Distance Education Network (DEN) from a satellite-based system to a flexible, Internet-based system that could expand its global presence dramatically. DEN enrollment skyrocketed, from roughly 250 to 1,220 students around the world. In 2006, U.S. News & World Report listed DEN as the largest e-learning graduate engineering program in the country.
Through community-outreach education and training programs he initiated—such as the USC Multimedia University Academy—more than 450 at-risk youths from central Los Angeles, as well as many dislocated workers, have been re-trained in multimedia and placed in the entertainment industry.
[edit] Faculty career
Over his two-decade career as an active scholar, Nikias was internationally recognized for his pioneering research on digital communications and signal processing, digital media systems, and biomedicine. He was principal or co-principal investigator for research grants and contracts of more than $50 million.
Nikias served as a senior consultant to a range of organizations that included Alcoa, Battelle, Mathworks, Ikanos Communications, Bourns Inc., and Northrop Grumman.
He also was a high-level consultant to the United States government, holding a security clearance for fifteen years. His innovations and patents in signal processing have been adopted by the U.S. Navy in sonar, radar, and communication systems.
He authored more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles, 180 refereed conference papers, three textbooks, and eight patents. Several of his publications and patents are in the field of translational medicine, including invasive and non-invasive methods for the detection and classification of myocardial ischemia, on which he worked in collaboration with the University of Maryland Hospital and Buffalo General Hospital.
Nikias has mentored more than 30 Ph.D. and postdoctoral students and has supervised 17 master’s student theses.
He has testified before the National Science Board on how the nation should address competitiveness challenges, and has also testified before the California legislature on the impact of digital media and communications on the entertainment industry and on the California economy. He has appeared on CNN and has written articles in major newspapers on topics such as the societal implications of new technology and the value of a classical education. Nikias also has been a keynote speaker on these topics at international conferences and conventions in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia.
[edit] Awards and Honors
Nikias has received numerous awards and honors for his research and teaching, including three Best Paper awards. He also received the Leadership Award from the USC Engineering Faculty Council in 2004.
He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a voting member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, and a fellow of the California Council on Science and Technology. He was honored by Loyola Marymount University for his contributions to sciences in 2001, and the Republic of Cyprus awarded him its Presidential Medallion in the Sciences in 2005.
The California Governor honored him with a formal commendation for cutting-edge research, the U.S. State Department awarded him a certificate of appreciation, and the Whitaker Foundation awarded him a prestigious grant in biomedicine. He also holds a membership in the Phi Kappa Phi and Tau Beta Pi societies.
Nikias serves as a member of the Board of Directors for the Lord Foundation of California, the Pacific Council on International Policy, and the Alfred Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering at USC, and as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Thomas Rivera Policy Institute, a freestanding non-profit that advances issues affecting Latino communities, and the Chadwick School, an independent K-12 school in Palos Verdes Peninsula, California.
A native of Cyprus, Nikias graduated with honors from the Famagusta Gymnasium, a school that emphasized history and Greco-Roman classics. He also received a Diploma from the National Technical University of Athens. He earned an M.S. and Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo. The University of Cyprus awarded him an honorary doctorate.
Nikias lives in Rancho Palos Verdes, California with his wife, Niki, and their two daughters, Georgiana and Maria. Georgiana is currently a senior at USC’s College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, pursuing a double major in English and Archaeology.
[edit] Publications
- Nikias, Chrysostomos L and Min Shao. Signal processing with alpha-stable distributions and applications. New York : Wiley, c1995. xiii, 168 p. : ill. ; 25 cm. ISBN 0-471-10647-X
- Nikias, Chrysostomos L. and Athina P. Petropulu. Higher-order spectra analysis : a nonlinear signal processing framework. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : PTR Prentice Hall, c1993. xxii, 537 p. : ill. ; 25 cm. ISBN 0-13-678210-8
