Dr. Judith A. Ramaley (pronounced Rah may lee) became the 24th President of The University of Vermont on July 1, 1997. She has been President and professor of biology at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon for the past seven years.

Dr. Ramaley received her bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College in 1963 and conducted her graduate studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she earned a doctorate in 1966. She served for two years as a post-doctoral fellow at Indiana University.

Dr. Ramaley has a special interest in higher-education reform and has played a significant role in designing regional alliances to promote educational cooperation. She also has contributed to a national exploration of the changing nature of work and the workforce and of the role of higher education in the school-to-work agenda.

In 1979, she was an American Council on Education fellow at the University of Nebraska Medical Center at Omaha, where she served as associate dean for research and development. The next year, she joined the University of Nebraska’s central administration as assistant vice president for academic affairs. In 1982, Ramaley became the chief academic officer at the State University of New York at Albany. She also served as executive vice president for academic affairs for two years and as acting president for one semester at SUNY-Albany. Ramaley was the executive vice chancellor at the University of Kansas from 1987 to 1990.

Dr. Ramaley has served as chair of the Academic Affairs Council of the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges (NASULGC) and as chair of the American Council on Education’s Commission on Women in Higher Education. She is a charter member of the National Science Foundation’s advisory committee for the biological sciences, a member of the Kellogg Commission for the Future of the State and Land Grant Universities and chair of NASULGC’s Commission on the Urban Agenda. In 1996, Portland State received a Pew Charitable Trusts leadership award and a W. K. Kellogg Foundation invitation to become a Kellogg Network for Institutional Transformation founding member.

Dr. Ramaley is an accomplished contralto and has performed as a soloist for various fund-raising events such as the annual concert performed by the Oregon Symphony for the Oregon Food Bank.

Dr. Ramaley has two sons, Alan and Andrew, and four grandsons, Adam, Zachary, Nathaniel and Matthew.