Northwestern University on Monday named Mung Chiang as its next president, choosing the Purdue University leader to take over a campus that spent much of the past year under federal pressure. Chiang will begin July 1 and become Northwestern’s 18th president.
He replaces Michael Schill, who resigned in September 2025, and will be followed for the next six weeks by interim President Henry Bienen, who will remain in the role until the end of June. The appointment gives Northwestern a permanent leader after a search launched in December by the Board of Trustees, with Vice Chair Steve Cahillane leading the search committee.
Chiang comes to Evanston after more than two years as president of Purdue, a job he took in January 2023 after serving as dean of Purdue’s College of Engineering from 2017 to 2023 and as the school’s executive vice president for strategic initiatives from 2021 to 2023. Before that, he spent 14 years at Princeton University, where he became one of the university’s youngest chair professors, chaired the Princeton Entrepreneurship Council and directed the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education.
Northwestern is betting that that mix of academic credibility and administrative experience can help steady the university after an ugly stretch of federal scrutiny. The university faced intense attention before reaching a deal with the Trump administration in November to restore research funding that the government had frozen in April 2025, a dispute centered on $790 million. Chiang is set to become Northwestern’s first Asian American president.
In a statement, Chiang said he has long admired Northwestern’s interdisciplinary scholarship, artistic creation, impactful research, healthcare system and school spirit. Peter Barris, a trustee and search committee member, said Chiang wants to advance Northwestern among the world’s great research institutions and has shown he can harness opportunity and momentum across the breadth of a university. Cahillane said Chiang repeatedly described Northwestern as one of the world’s most eminent comprehensive universities, where interdisciplinary culture drives innovation and new ideas.
Chiang earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and mathematics from Stanford University, along with a master’s degree and Ph.D. in electrical engineering there. At Purdue, he helped secure $3.9 billion in investments to build an artificial intelligence memory chip packaging facility, and he helped design and implement the 2022 federal CHIPS and Science Act. In 2020, he became the first engineer appointed to serve as science and technology adviser to the U.S. Secretary of State, a nonpartisan role that underscored how far his career had moved beyond campus administration.
The choice signals that Northwestern wants a president who understands both research power and political pressure. Chiang arrives with a record built on engineering, fundraising and federal policy, and he will need all three as he takes over a university still working to put its funding crisis behind it.
