Harris Pastides biography

Harris Pastides is serving as the 28th president of the University of South Carolina, elected to that position by the university's board of trustees on Aug. 1, 2008. His election marked the first internal candidate for the presidency of the university in over a half-century. Previously, Dr. Pastides had served as vice president for research and health sciences and dean of the Arnold School of Public Health. He and his wife, Patricia, first came to the university in 1998.

Dr. Pastides sees USC as a place for producing leaders who can have extraordinary impacts at the local and global levels. His guiding philosophy for students, faculty and staff is “participate, innovate and lead.” His personal priorities are leadership, health, rule of law, K-12 education and energy. Dr. Pastides currently serves as the Southeastern Conference representative on the NCAA board of directors.

Under his leadership, the university's student population has grown to record levels at the Columbia campus and among the system's regional institutions. Entering freshman SAT averages have shown continued growth as have their average GPAs. In athletics, the University of South Carolina's men's and women's teams have enjoyed extraordinary successes across the array of sports in the university system in the past two years.

In November 2011, the university will announce the public phase of an unprecedented capital campaign to fund essential needs to succeed in global competition for knowledge, research, discovery and development. In addition, the university is completing a comprehensive branding campaign to assure cohesive communications of its goals and its successes.

Before joining the university's faculty, Dr. Pastides was a professor of epidemiology and chairman of the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He received his master's of public health and his Ph.D. in epidemiology from Yale University.