Chrysostomos Loizos "Max" Nikias (; born September 30, 1952) is a Cypriot-American academic, and served as the 11th University of Southern California president, a position he held from August 3, 2010, to August 7, 2018. He holds the Malcolm R. Currie Chair in Technology and the Humanities and is president emeritus of the university. He had been at USC since 1991, as a professor, director of national research centers, dean, provost, and president. He also served as chair of the College Football Playoff (CFP) Board of Managers (2015-2018) as chair of the board of the Keck Medical Center at USC (2009-2018), as member of the board of directors of the Alfred Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering (2001-2018), and as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Chadwick School, an independent school in Palos Verdes Peninsula, Calif. (2001-2010). He is currently a tenured professor in electrical engineering with a secondary appointment in classics, and the director of the USC Institute for Technology Enabled Higher Education.
In May 2018, 200 tenured USC professors (out of about 1,181 tenured faculty) demanded Nikias's resignation for how his administration dealt with nearly 300 incidents of sexual assault and sexual misconduct allegations over 27 years against a longtime student health center gynecologist, George Tyndall. He and the board of trustees agreed to an orderly transition to a new president on May 25, 2018, and he stepped down on August 7, 2018. Following this, Nikias was named president emeritus and a life trustee of the university. The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights' independent investigation concluded with a report published in February 2020 and did not implicate Nikias or his predecessor in any specific wrongdoing.
Nikias is the current President of the Advisory Board of the Council for International Relations – Greece. He serves on the board of directors of Visions-inc, a non-profit organization that was created to promote the benefits of multiculturalism. He also lectures and moderates panels on the geopolitical storms surrounding semiconductor chips and their supply chain, as well as on cybersecuring democratic elections.
Early life
Nikias was born on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. There, he graduated with honors from the Famagusta Gymnasium, a school that emphasizes sciences, history, and Greco-Roman classics. He married his wife, Niki, in 1977, and the couple have two daughters, Georgiana and Maria. He received a degree in electrical and mechanical engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in 1977, and has an academic interest in Athenian drama and democracy. Nikias earned a master's degree in 1980 and a Ph.D in 1982 in electrical engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His predecessor as USC president, Steven Sample, was likewise an electrical engineer, and served as president of SUNY-Buffalo from 1982 to 1991.
Career
Associate Dean and Center Director in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering (1991–2001) Nikias served as founding director of the school's Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) from 1996 to 2001. He led the engineering school's effort to secure the center in an intense national competition conducted by the National Science Foundation that included 116 other proposals. Nikias also served as associate dean of the engineering school from 1992 to 2001. While his research work ranged from signal processing and biomedical engineering to digital communications and military radar and sonar, he is best known for his understanding of multimedia's defining place in the future of the internet and the IMSC.
Dean of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering (2001–2005) From 2001 to 2005, Nikias served as dean of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, solidifying its position as a top-tier engineering school. He directed the expansion of the school's biomedical engineering enterprise and developed its distance-learning program into one of the largest in the country at that time. He oversaw the development of the school's Tutor Hall of Engineering. He also established key partnerships with corporations, among them Pratt & Whitney, Airbus, Boeing, Chevron, and Northrop Grumman, and led a fundraising campaign that brought in more than $250 million, capped by a $52 million school-naming gift from Andrew and Erna Viterbi. Nikias was instrumental in supporting the Information Sciences Institute in the USC Viterbi School, and in working with faculty across the university to establish two National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Research Centers (ERC), as well as the Department of Homeland Security's first Research Center of Excellence at USC.
