Judith Aitken Ramaley, who served as the University of Vermont’s 24th president, and was the institution’s first woman president, died August 24, 2026.

A biologist by training, Ramaley held her first academic administrative position, assistant vice president for academic affairs, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She later moved to the State University of New York at Albany as executive vice president for academic affairs, and in the late 1980s joined the University of Kansas as executive vice chancellor before returning to SUNY Albany as acting president. In 1990 she was named president of Portland State University in Oregon. She served in that position until 1997, when she was named president of the University of Vermont and professor of biology.

Ramaley was born in California in 1941, and earned her bachelor's degree from Swarthmore College and her Ph.D. from UCLA. She later was a postdoctoral associate at Indiana University. She married Robert Ramaley in 1966 and they had two sons.

In addition to her administrative appointments, Ramaley served in prominent positions for the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges (now known as APLU – the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities); the American Association of Colleges and Universities; the Commission on Women in Higher Education of the American Council on Education; the National Collegiate Athletic Association; the Bio Advisory Board of the Division of Biological Sciences of the National Science Foundation; the National Advisory Council for School-to-Work Opportunities; and the Kellogg Commission for the Future of State and Land Grant Universities.

After leaving UVM in 2001, Ramaley became assistant director of the Education and Human Resources Directorate at the National Science Foundation (NSF). Ramaley is credited, during her tenure at the NSF,  with coining the popular STEM acronym for the related fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Ramaley served as president of Minnesota’s Winona State University from 2005 to 2012, and then returned to Portland State University as a Distinguished Professor of Public Service in PSU’s Hatfield School of Government.