Safa Zaki, who on July 1, 2023, becomes Bowdoin’s sixteenth president and the first woman to lead the College, received an honorary degree from Williams College, where she has been dean of the faculty and the John B. McCoy and John T. McCoy Professor of Psychology.
In presenting the honorary degree during Williams’s Commencement on June 4, 2023, Williams College President Maud Mandel referenced Zaki’s scholarship as an internationally renowned psychologist and cognitive scientist.
“For someone who studies categorization, you’re awfully hard to pin down,” Mandel said.
“Your experiments on everything from eye movements to amnesia to autism have contributed to the fundamental understanding of human cognition. How do people assign things to categories? But your career itself defies easy analysis: You combine deep work in your field with a gift for interdisciplinarity. You conduct advanced research but are also a superb teacher of novice students. You’re a brilliant scholar and a gifted administrator. Even though you came from Egypt, you learned to love sledding!”
Zaki joined the faculty at Williams in 2002 as assistant professor of psychology. Appointed dean of the faculty at Williams in 2020, she was named to the John B. McCoy and John T. McCoy Professorship in 2022.
Zaki’s inauguration as president of Bowdoin College will be held on campus October 13–14, 2023.
