C. L. Max Nikias

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Chrysostomos L. Max Nikias has served as provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at the University of Southern California since June 2005.

Over the course of his career as a researcher, educator, and university administrator, Nikias has earned acclaim for his leadership, innovation, and fundraising, as well as his ability to build partnerships among varied constituencies.

As USC’s chief academic officer and second-ranking officer under President Steven B. Sample, Nikias is charged with accelerating the academic momentum that the university has experienced in recent years. This effort is focused on cross-disciplinary scholarship, international collaboration, socially beneficial innovation, community service, and the use of the arts and humanities as educational tools for students outside of the arts. He also works with the president and the deans in fundraising efforts for the university’s academic programs.

He oversees a vast academic community, made up of 33,000 students and 3,200 full-time faculty members, with an annual budget of $1.9 billion. USC’s College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, the graduate school, the USC Keck School of Medicine, and 15 professional schools, as well as the divisions of Student Affairs, Student Religious Life, Information Technology Services, and Enrollment Services report directly to the provost. Nikias also serves as the chair of the USC Keck School of Medicine Clinical Operations Oversight Committee.

A passionate advocate for the arts and classical education, Nikias launched Visions and Voices, an arts and humanities initiative, in 2005. To provide maximum educational advantage through USC’s renowned constellation of arts programs and through partnerships with Los Angeles’ cultural organizations, the initiative features film festivals, theatrical plays, humanities lectures, exhibitions, and musical and other performances. Each event is accompanied by organized discussions or reflective components, to help students from every discipline to gain new perspectives and to consider the timeless values inherent within the artwork or performance. Nikias also enjoys teaching microseminars to freshman students on the ancient Athenian democracy, drama, and arts.

Nikias also established the USC Levan Institute for Humanities and Ethics. The institute, made possible by a gift from Dr. Norman Levan, organizes and issues a grand challenge to every new USC student: to engage with, understand, and be informed by the timeless values at the core of our humanity.

Working with faculty and deans, Nikias has created numerous other initiatives and programs, including:

  • a grant program for advancing scholarship in the humanities and social sciences;
  • major initiatives in highly interdisciplinary research areas, such as nanosciences, new energy sources, bioinformatics, and biomedical imaging;
  • an internationalization initiative that prepares students for lives in a global marketplace, and that benefits the academic community through transcontinental alliances in research, education, and community service;
  • a first-of-its-kind, cross-disciplinary academic institute examining all facets of the evolving U.S.-China relationship;
  • an undergraduate education initiative to offer students both the resources of a large college and the personal attention found at a small college;
  • a university-wide venture to jump-start distance-learning and continuing-education activities at all USC schools;
  • a pioneering general education initiative in multimedia literacy that can equip every student with state-of-the art educational and communication tools;
  • a transformation of traditional and new information services, including a federated information-technology approach that is being emulated at other top universities;
  • and a diversity hiring initiative that emphasizes the additional recruitment of outstanding women and minority candidates to the USC faculty (this initiative was spotlighted in a major Chronicle of Higher Education feature).

During the first 24 months of his tenure as provost, Nikias’ responsibilities involved the assembling of an administrative and decanal team to advance the university’s strategic plan in the coming years. Of the 16 persons newly recruited to leadership positions as a result of national searches, 12 were deans, including those of medicine, the College, business, architecture, and university libraries. The chief recruitment goal was to infuse USC with new talent from top institutions around the globe.

Moreover, working with the Roybal family, Nikias established the USC Edward R. Roybal Institute on Applied Gerontology, to address interdisciplinary research and education programs.

Nikias was also instrumental in negotiating on behalf of the university the relocation of the Shoah Foundation—originally established by filmmaker and USC trustee Steven Spielberg—and the establishment of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. The Shoah Foundation’s repository of 52,000 testimonies of Holocaust survivors has been transferred to USC in perpetuity; this unique material, representing the world’s largest digital library, allows USC to significantly advance scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.

Nikias has taken steps to make USC a pacesetter in translating discoveries into timely innovation that can meet society’s most pressing needs. He worked to establish the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation, made possible by a gift from USC Trustee Mark Stevens, partner at the legendary VC firm, Sequoia Capital. USC Stevens, a university-wide institute in the office of the Provost, harnesses the creative thinking and innovative work at the University of Southern California's college, 17 professional schools, and research programs to build a multidisciplinary approach to innovation. Krisztina Holly, vice provost for innovation and executive director of the USC Stevens, spearheads the development of programs and approaches to help faculty and students bring innovations to the market and develop their skills as innovators.


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[edit] Deanship Tenure

Nikias joined USC’s faculty in 1991 and was named dean of the Viterbi School of Engineering and holder of the Z. A. Kaprielian Dean’s Chair in 2001. During his deanship, the school staked out a consistent position as a top-ten engineering school according to traditional measures, while simultaneously charting a course as an academic leader in emerging, nontraditional metrics.

Nikias recruited 30 world-class faculty members to the school and also tripled the number of women on the faculty. He led an effort to develop a new engineering curriculum that could attract and retain more top young minds—leading to an increase in student diversity and quality. He also undertook the expansion of the school’s biomedical and biochemical engineering programs.

A skilled builder of bridges between academia, industry, and government, he played key roles in bringing several major research institutes to USC before and during his deanship. Nikias was the founding director of two national research centers at USC: the National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Research Center (ERC) on Integrated Media Systems and the Department of Defense Center for Research on Applied Signal Processing (CRASP).

He has also supported an expanded role for USC’s acclaimed Information Sciences Institute, and worked with faculty across the university to establish an additional NSF ERC in Biomimetics, as well as the Department of Homeland Security’s first Research Center of Excellence. He also built research partnerships with major corporations such as Pratt & Whitney, Chevron, Boeing, and Airbus, and prestigious universities such as the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur and China’s Tsinghua University.

Nikias led fundraising efforts that brought more than $220 million in gifts and new endowment to the engineering school during his four-year tenure as dean. A historic $52 million naming gift from Andrew and Erna Viterbi in 2004 drew worldwide attention. Two departments within the school also received major naming gifts—the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

His leadership efforts made possible a significant update and expansion of the school’s physical plant, most notably the 103,000 square-foot Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering.

Nikias led the transformation of the school’s Distance Education Network (DEN) from a satellite-based system to a flexible, Internet-based system that could expand its global presence dramatically. DEN enrollment skyrocketed, from roughly 250 to 1,220 students around the world. In 2006, U.S. News & World Report listed DEN as the largest e-learning graduate engineering program in the country.

[edit] National Multimedia Research Center

Nikias was recruited to USC to develop a national-caliber center for multimedia research. As founding director and principal investigator for the Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC), he drew on a diverse group of faculty experts, including scholars from the cinematic arts, communication and journalism, music, fine arts, psychology, computer science, and engineering. He also built collaborations with high-tech companies across the nation. In a fierce competition in 1996, the IMSC proposal to NSF was ranked first out of 117.

The center has produced 12 spin-off companies, and its research has led to 144 inventions disclosed, 92 licenses issued, and 79 patent applications filed over the course of a decade.

More than 30 corporations jointed IMSC’s rich and vibrant industry collaboration and technology transfer program, providing USC faculty and students with valuable internship opportunities.

IMSC has helped revolutionize the creation and transmission of entertainment media. A new generation of filmmakers, sound effects specialists, and immersive audio technicians have developed innovative talents and skills, approaching their craft in ways that might have seemed previously unimaginable. IMSC’s most significant contributions so far have come in the areas of multi-channel immersion on the Internet; correcting distortions in the listening environment; geospatial decision-making; and “serious game” to teach complex science concepts. Today, IMSC continues to give shape to the emerging digital media revolution, while setting the pace for research and education in the field.

Nikias also initiated community-outreach education and training programs—such as the IMSC Multimedia University Academy—that re-trained more than 450 at-risk youths from central Los Angeles, as well as many dislocated workers, in multimedia and placed them in the entertainment industry.

IMSC’s success in bringing together diverse fields later led the United States Army to establish USC as the site for the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). ICT partners the Department of Defense with the Hollywood entertainment industry and USC’s engineering, cinematic arts, and communication schools in order to train the nation’s defense forces. The institute creates the most effective and efficient learning experiences possible, through simulations that redefine the outer limits of virtual reality.

[edit] Faculty career

Over his two-decade career as an active scholar, Nikias was internationally recognized for his pioneering research on digital communications and signal processing, digital media systems, and biomedicine. He was principal or co-principal investigator for research grants and contracts of more than $50 million.

Nikias served as a senior consultant to a range of organizations that included Alcoa, Battelle, Mathworks, Ikanos Communications, Bourns Inc., and Northrop Grumman.

He has also been a high-level consultant to the United States government, holding a security clearance for fifteen years. His innovations and patents in signal processing have been adopted by the U.S. Navy in sonar, radar, and mobile communication systems. His innovative interdisciplinary curricula in signal processing systems have been used by the Department of Defense to train over 2,500 scientists and engineers.

He authored more than 95 peer-reviewed journal articles, 180 refereed conference papers, three textbooks, and eight patents. In communications and signal processing, he was the first to pioneer the development of robust blind equalization and interference rejection methods based on higher-order spectra and alpha-stable distribution models. He also pioneered the development of robust adaptive methods for joint angle and Doppler estimation in severe impulsive noise environments. Several of his publications and patents are in the field of translational medicine, including invasive and non-invasive methods for the detection and classification of myocardial ischemia, on which he worked in collaboration with the University of Maryland Hospital and Buffalo General Hospital.

Nikias has mentored more than 30 Ph.D. and postdoctoral students and has supervised 17 master’s student theses.

He has testified before the National Science Board on how the nation should address competitiveness challenges, and has also testified before the California legislature on the impact of digital media and communications on the entertainment industry and on the California economy. He has appeared on CNN and has written articles in major newspapers on topics such as the societal implications of new technology and the value of a classical education. Nikias also has been a keynote speaker on these topics at international conferences and conventions in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia.

[edit] Awards and Honors

Nikias has received numerous awards and honors for his research and teaching, including three Best Paper awards. His publication on the parametric bispectrum received the prestigious Signal Processing Best Paper Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He received the Fred W. Ellersick Award for Outstanding Unclassified Paper at Military Communications (MILCOM) for his work in blind equalization for mobile digital communications. He also received the IEEE A.H. Reeves Premium Best Paper Award for his work on advanced radar receivers.

Nikias is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), recognizing his “contributions to the development and diverse applications of adaptive signal processing, and for leadership in engineering education.” He is also the recipient of the 2008 IEEE Simon Ramo Medal for “outstanding leadership in engineering systems research and education, and for pioneering contributions to integrated media systems for the entertainment industry.”

Nikias is a Fellow of the IEEE. He is also a member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, a Fellow of the California Council on Science and Technology, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He was honored by Loyola Marymount University for his contributions to sciences in 2001, and the Republic of Cyprus awarded him its Presidential Medallion in the Sciences in 2005.

The California Governor honored him with a formal commendation for cutting-edge research, the U.S. State Department awarded him a certificate of appreciation, and the Whitaker Foundation awarded him a prestigious grant in biomedicine. In 2007, the USC Black Alumni Association awarded him its Thomas Kilgore Service Award. He also holds a membership in the Phi Kappa Phi and Tau Beta Pi societies.

Nikias serves as a member of the Board of Directors for the Lord Foundation of California, the Pacific Council on International Policy, and the Alfred Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering at USC, and as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute, a freestanding non-profit that advances issues affecting Latino communities, and the Chadwick School, an independent K-12 school on California’s Palos Verdes Peninsula.

Nikias received a diploma from the National Technical University of Athens, sometimes simply known as National Metsovion Polytechnic, the oldest and most prestigious higher education institution of Greece. He also graduated with honors from the Famagusta Gymnasium, a school that emphasized history and Greco-Roman classics. He earned an M.S. and Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo. The University of Cyprus awarded him an honorary doctorate.

Nikias lives on the Palos Verdes Peninsula in California with his wife, Niki, and their two daughters, Georgiana and Maria. Niki received a bachelor’s degree in accounting from the University of Athens, Greece and a master’s in business administration (MBA) with a specialization in finance from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She has worked as a corporate accountant in Athens and London, and subsequently as an accountant and finance consultant in the United States. Georgiana graduated from the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences with a double major in English and Archaeology and is now pursuing graduate studies at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. Maria graduated from the Chadwick School and is currently a freshman at the USC College.

[edit] Publications

  • Nikias, Chrysostomos L and Min Shao. Signal processing with alpha-stable distributions and applications. New York : Wiley, c1995. xiii, 168 p. : ill. ; 25 cm. ISBN 0-471-10647-X
  • Nikias, Chrysostomos L. and Athina P. Petropulu. Higher-order spectra analysis : a nonlinear signal processing framework. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : PTR Prentice Hall, c1993. xxii, 537 p. : ill. ; 25 cm. ISBN 0-13-678210-8

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