Biography

Linda G. Mills became the 17th president of New York University on July 1, 2023.

President Mills is also the Lisa Ellen Goldberg Professor of Social Work, Public Policy, and Law and founder of the NYU Center on Violence and Recovery. Mills is a fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare, the country’s leading honorific society of scholars dedicated to excellence in the field.

Mills’ scholarship is influenced by her family’s experience during the Holocaust, including her Jewish mother’s escape from Vienna in 1939 and her great-grandmother’s murder by the Nazis in Riga. This history has driven her to explore questions related to justice, resiliency, and recovery. Mills’ principal areas of scholarly focus are trauma, bias, and domestic violence; her groundbreaking research funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Justice has reshaped the field of treatment in domestic violence and her restorative justice-based programs are currently being adopted in several jurisdictions across the U.S. She is a widely published author of articles appearing in Harvard Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Journal of Experimental Criminology, and Nature: Human Behavior, among others. Her books have been published by Princeton University Press, University of Michigan Press, Springer, and Basic Books. As a filmmaker, she has produced award-winning documentaries that have debuted at Tribeca Film Festival and the Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival and have been shown in Abu Dhabi, Austria, and Tunisia, among other countries. Of Many: Then and Now appeared on ABC to 8.1 million viewers.

Mills first came to NYU as an Associate Professor of Social Work in 1999 and in 2001 was promoted to full Professor. In 2002, she was named Vice Provost (and in 2006 Senior Vice Provost) for Undergraduate Education and University Life. She became NYU’s Vice Chancellor and Senior Vice Provost for Global Programs and University Life in 2012. Prior to coming to NYU, from 1994 to 1998, she was a Lecturer in the School of Law and an Assistant Professor in the UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research, where she received early tenure. 

Mills received her PhD in Health Policy in 1994 from Brandeis University, where she was a Pew Scholar; her MSW from San Francisco State University in 1986; her JD from the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco in 1983; and her BA in history and social thought from the University of California, Irvine in 1979. She was admitted to the California Bar in 1983 and first became a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in 1990.