Nicholas B. Dirks, PhD is President and Chief Executive Officer of The New York Academy of Sciences and a distinguished historian and anthropologist. Previously, Dirks served as Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, where Dirks led major initiatives in education, research collaboration, and data science. Prior to Berkeley, Dirks held leadership and academic roles at Columbia University and taught at the University of Michigan and California Institute of Technology.

Dirks earned a B.A. from Wesleyan University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. An accomplished author and scholar, Dirks has received numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Foundation residential fellowship. Dirks is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.