Maronite Christian

This is the seventy-first of Arab America’s series on American pathbreakers of Arab descent. The series includes personalities from entertainment, business, sports, science, arts, academia, journalism, and politics, among other areas. Our seventy-first pathbreaker, Joseph E. Aoun, is a well-known higher education thought leader, renowned linguistics scholar, and the seventh President of Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. Born to a Lebanese Maronite Christian family, Aoun studied in Beirut, Paris, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Contributing writer John Mason describes how he has become an internationally respected voice on the value of higher education generally and in the role colleges and universities should play in meeting the challenges and opportunities associated with the transformative effects of artificial intelligence.