Provost

Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) opened with seven faculty members and a singular proposition: that research in artificial intelligence had advanced enough to warrant a university built entirely around it.

Today, the university has 160+ faculty among them recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship, the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, and the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award, and fellows of the IEEE, ACM, and the International Society for Computational Biology. Its student body has passed 900, drawn from over 50 countries. It is ranked 10th globally across AI, computational biology, computer vision, machine learning, natural language processing, and robotics by CSRankings ahead of institutions that have been building their reputations for a century.

It has done this, in the words of MBZUAI President and University Professor Eric Xing, by showing results, making a visible difference, and then asking stakeholders to top up and double down because of the results.

MBZUAI is now seeking a Provost.

The university introduced a five-divisional academic structure in 2026. Two divisions are operational: Computing and Mathematical Sciences, led by Dean ric Moulines, and Biological and Life Sciences, led by Dean Eran Segal. Three further divisions are in development. The undergraduate program is in its second year. The faculty community, already distinguished, continues to grow.

This is a role for someone who wants to help build an institution not manage a settled one at a moment when the field it is built around is reshaping every other field, in a city and a country that have made a serious commitment to making that happen.

The character of the institution is worth understanding. Professor Xing describes it as a forge: faculty are the core of the institution; research is evaluated on intellectual merit and scientific impact, not grant volume; and teaching is the primary duty of every faculty member, including the most senior.

The university has replaced the classical department structure, with divisions designed to reward interdisciplinary collaboration and large-scale, problem-driven research while preserving the intellectual freedom and rigor that distinguish academic science from everything else. By the end of its second phase of growth, Xing has set a target of at least 30 percent of faculty holding membership of national academies or fellowships of their professional societies.

The Provost will report to and work in close partnership with President Xing, himself an active researcher and one of the most cited figures in his field. Where the President sets the vision and overarching institutional strategy, the Provost gives that strategy academic form translating it into programs, policies, and institutional practices that enable faculty and student success. At a university planning for significant growth, much of that work remains to be done, and existing approaches should be expected to be reconsidered.

The right candidate will bring the scholarly standing to earn the respect of a distinguished faculty, the leadership experience to run a complex and fast-moving academic enterprise, and the ambition to do something that has not been done before.