Walking the Talk

Miranda’s insight regarding public education marks a change of direction, considering her prior academic roles have mostly been at private universities. She spent 20 years on the faculty at Duke University, where she earned her undergraduate degree in mathematics. Her PhD and master’s are from Harvard University, and she served as provost of both Rice University in Houston and the University of Notre Dame. Her time as a dean at the University of Michigan was the most formative in her leadership arc and eventually led her to rethink her priorities while at Notre Dame.

“The pandemic made me spend time thinking about what was important to me — how I wanted to spend my time, what I wanted to work on and how and why that work was meaningful,” Miranda says.

Miranda’s highly successful research career is laser-focused on social issues, and her research team is best known for its work on childhood lead exposure. Even as she emerged as an administrative star, first as dean of the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources and Environment, and then at Rice and Notre Dame, she found herself frustrated that she was not able to spend the majority of her time on the things that were most important to her. She became determined to find and lead a public university where her leadership skills would serve a social justice mission.

That place, of course, is UIC. As Miranda gets settled on campus, the university already is on an upward trajectory. This fall, the university welcomed its largest-ever freshman class and saw increases in first-generation freshmen as well as Black students. UIC received $509 million in research funding during its 2023 fiscal year, its fifth-straight record-breaking year. The university also climbed in rankings. The Wall Street Journal named UIC as No. 13 among public universities and No. 8 for “social mobility” — a reflection of a school’s ability to enroll and graduate students who receive need-based federal financial aid. U.S. News & World Report ranked UIC in the top 40 for ethnic diversity and top 50 for innovation. Campus Pride ranked UIC as a top 30 university for LGBTQ+ students. Likewise, UIC’s health care practices serve as crucial examples of UIC’s mission in action, training a diverse population of next-generation expert clinicians while also providing care to people in need across Chicago and Illinois. 

“We have exquisitely good researchers on our campus — I would match our faculty up in many, many, many areas against the best faculty at any university,” Miranda says. “UIC faculty have trained at the best places, they’re doing world-class research, and they’re at UIC because they choose to be at a university with the kind of mission that we have.”

Miranda wants to build upon UIC’s research pedigree while also improving graduation and retention rates, increasing the number of students who earn undergraduate degrees within four years of enrollment and reducing the disparities in graduation and retention rates among students from different backgrounds. She wants to ensure deeper support for UIC’s graduate and professional school students. She wants to strengthen the alumni community by encouraging lifetime engagement with UIC, especially through mentoring students. As an interdisciplinary scholar whose research program — the Children’s Environmental Health Initiative — relies on con­tributions from health care scholars, geospatial analysts, statisticians and economists, Miranda also is keen to identify and expand research collaborations that cross departmental boundaries. 

“To get to the next level in terms of research productivity, we need to be more successful at collaborative research — grants where you have multiple faculty working together on different components of a larger project,” Miranda says. 

Identifying and fostering those collaborations requires vision, diplomacy and humility. The key, according to Miranda, is to listen closely to faculty research presentations and other campus initiatives in order to spot opportunities for cross-disciplinary research partnerships.

“It’s kind of like you’re discovering teams instead of building teams because sometimes people just need help being connected,” Miranda says.

Miranda is excited about the primacy of UIC’s social justice mission not only because of its potential to benefit society, but because it represents a unifying common thread that runs throughout the university community. She said her early conversations at UIC inevitably turn to the university’s mission, whether she’s meeting with faculty or alumni, attending a basketball game or chatting with a groundskeeper.  

“If an organization wants to make a big difference in the world, the very first thing it needs is a set of shared values,” says Miranda. “UIC already has that shared set of values around social justice, and there’s no greater first asset to have.”

Miranda is the first American-born child of immigrant parents and grew up in Michigan, where her father landed his “dream job” at the University of Detroit, now called Detroit Mercy. She loved dance and mathematics. Sports drew her in, and during high school she would take her physics homework to basketball games at her father’s university, working on problem sets during timeouts and halftime. 

Later, when Miranda enrolled as an undergraduate at Duke, she and her college roommate were hired as student managers to support the basketball team under its new head coach Mike Krzyzewski, or “Coach K,” who went on to become a Hall of Fame coach and a renowned motivator. He also became one of Miranda’s first mentors. She credits him with instilling in both his players and student managers a powerful sense of community and belonging that she hopes to replicate at UIC. 

After she finished her doctoral work at Harvard in 1990, Miranda married her husband, and they built a family. “I feel that my identity as a leader is deeply tied to my family, and I talk about my family as I lead in ways that many others do not,” she notes. 

Miranda’s stories about fishing with her husband, coaching her son’s baseball games, discussing geospatial health with her middle child (“That apple didn’t even fall off the tree,” says Miranda.) or caring for her youngest daughter as she battled cancer, make powerful connections with people. She is at once an ivy-league graduate who has risen to the pinnacle of university leadership and also a daughter who followed in her father’s footsteps, a wife who enjoys tending to her bees with her husband on their farm and a working mother who is deeply devoted to her children. 

As an academic leader, Miranda draws upon these experiences not only when building relationships, but also when brokering compromises and de-escalating burgeoning conflicts.

In those instances, Miranda says she looks for points of agreement and connection as a starting point toward building greater consensus: “Where’s our point of common ground here? What small postage stamp of common ground can we both put our toe on and work from there?”

Miranda’s low-key, even-keel approach to defusing high-temperature conversations also derives from her former boss and current executive coach, Mary Sue Coleman, who was president of the University of Michigan while Miranda served as a dean there. While at Michigan, Miranda marveled at how Coleman kept her cool in a variety of situations — and how her kindness and composure ultimately led to positive outcomes. 

The lesson learned for Miranda is to listen empathetically and engage consistently so that during difficult conversations, “You might not give people exactly the answer that they want, but you’re always interacting with people in a way that they feel respected, they feel heard.”

Miranda is a nature-lover. She sits on the Environmental Defense Fund’s board of trustees, and she and her husband own an Indiana farm called Orange Belton Sugars, named after the family’s English Setters. It’s the place where Miranda practices her second career as a beekeeper. 

The greenness of UIC’s campus and the panoramic view of Lake Michigan from her office helps her feel connected to the environment. But it’s the family of peregrine falcons that lives atop University Hall, immediately above Miranda’s office, that most delights her. She’s named them Loop, Little and Italy, in honor of some of the communities visible from their shared perch, with a high, southern- and eastern-facing view so vast that she never tires of it.

That view, along with Miranda’s experience of rural life — she and her husband are keeping the farm, which is less than two hours away — also informs her sense of the scope of UIC’s mandate, a constant reminder that the school’s mission is rooted in Chicago, but stretches across the state. (For example, UIC provides care for complex dental cases across Illinois, and its colleges of medicine, nursing and pharmacy have campuses across the state in Rockford, Peoria, Springfield, Urbana and the Quad Cities.)

That broad sphere of influence is another component of what makes UIC appealing to Miranda. 

“You don’t have to pick, ‘Am I going to work on urban social justice issues, or am I going to work on rural social justice issues?’ Simply make the choice that ‘I’m going to commit my professional life to working on social justice’ — that’s the decision you have to make,” she says. 

It’s a vision that she’s excited to share with the UIC community, and one that she believes can have an extraordinary impact. 

“If it all comes together, these things will be true: UIC is a place where you can get an education that will allow you to compete globally and lead a meaningful life,” Miranda says. “UIC researchers are tackling the most intransigent problems and giving people reason for hope. UIC is deeply engaged and embedded in its home community of Chicago, and moving the needle on key problems for our home city. And UIC is broadly perceived as a resource for everyone.”

As Miranda settles into a new home that seems perfectly aligned with her own priorities, she is brimming with vision, optimism and enthusiasm for the road ahead.

It’s a road she plans to walk, rather than drive.