Claudine Gay

Claudine Gay (born August 4, 1970) is an American political scientist who is the Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University. Her research focuses on American political behavior, including voter turnout and politics of race and identity.

Gay served as the dean of Social Sciences at Harvard from 2015 to 2018, as the dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences from 2018 to 2023, and as the 30th president of Harvard University from July 2023 to January 2024.

In December 2023, Gay and two other university presidents faced pressure from the public and from a Congressional committee to resign, over responses to instances of antisemitic violence on the campus. Amid this pressure campaign Gay was accused of plagiarism in academic publications, although the allegations have been sharply contested. In January 2024, she resigned from the presidency.

Gay was born in The Bronx on August 4, 1970, and grew up initially in New York City, with her older brother, Sony Gay, Jr. Her parents were international students from Haiti, who met in New York City as college students in 1967. Her mother, Claudette Gay, née Bateau (1946–2023), studied nursing and her father studied civil engineering. While still a child, Gay and her family moved to Saudi Arabia, where her father, Sony Gay, Sr., worked for the United States Army Corps of Engineers. The family moved back to the United States and lived in Georgia and Colorado. Feminist writer Roxane Gay is Gay's first cousin. Their family owns and runs Haiti's largest concrete plant, located in Port-au-Prince.

Gay attended Phillips Exeter Academy, a private boarding school in Exeter, New Hampshire, from which she graduated in 1988. She attended Princeton University for one year before transferring to Stanford University where she majored in economics and graduated in 1992, receiving the Anna Laura Myers Prize for outstanding thesis in economics. Gay earned a Ph.D. in 1998 from Harvard University and won the university's Toppan Prize for the best dissertation in political science.

After graduating, Gay was an assistant professor, and later tenured associate professor, in Stanford's Department of Political Science from 2000 to 2006. In the 2003–2004 academic year, she was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

Gay's research addresses American political behavior, including voter turnout, housing policy, and the politics of race and identity. She was recruited by Harvard to be a professor of government in 2006, and was appointed professor of African-American studies in 2007.

In 2015, Gay was named the dean of social sciences at the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) and the Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and of African and African-American Studies. In 2018, she was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.