Minister of Education Dr Rupert Roopnaraine has said government plans to nominate Professor Nigel Harris to serve as Chancellor of the University of Guyana (UG).
According to a statement from the Education Ministry, Roopnaraine said Harris would be nominated through the government’s representative on the UG Council.
Professor Harris has a long and distinguished career in education, including serving as Vice Chancellor (VC) of the University of the West Indies (UWI) from 2004 to 2015. “Prior to serving as VC at UWI, he was Dean and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia,” the Education Ministry said.
During his tenure as VC, UWI sent several teams to UG to assist in areas such as Strategic Planning, updating the Library and ICT system, auditing UG’s finances, restructuring the Human Resource Department, and curriculum reform. UWI also collaborated with UG to win grants from the Europe Union and to deliver a few post-graduate programmes.
Harris has also held several leadership posts, including Chairman of CXC (2006 to 2014), Chairman of the Association of Commonwealth Universities (2011 to 2013), and he is currently President of the Caribbean Association of Universities, Colleges and Institutes (UNICA) and administrative board member of the International Association of Universities (IAU), which is a consortium of over 600 universities around the world.
Professor Harris is Guyanese by birth and was educated at Queen’s College; Howard University; Yale University; University of Pennsylvania; and the University of the West Indies. He is a rheumatologist who is best known academically for identifying with collaborators a disorder called the Antiphospholipid Syndrome and for developing a test for its diagnosis and he has published extensively on these subjects.
He is married to Dr Yvette Williams-Harris, who is Guyanese by birth and they have three children and five grandchildren.
