Junius Gonzales, MD, MBA, joined Montclair State University as Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs on March 7, 2022. As the second-highest ranking officer of the University, Dr. Gonzales leads the University’s 10 colleges and schools, which offer more than 300 academic degree programs serving some 21,000 students, the second-largest enrollment at any higher education institution in New Jersey.

Over a distinguished 30-year career, Dr. Gonzales has worked as a faculty member, researcher, consultant and senior administrator. He most recently served as Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at the New York Institute of Technology. Dr. Gonzales brings extensive experience as a leader in higher education. He has served as the chief academic officer at the University of Texas-El Paso (UTEP), a Hispanic-Serving Institution, which like Montclair is committed to serving a diverse 21st-century student demographic and one that has achieved R1 designation as a top tier research university. Dr. Gonzales led efforts at UTEP that significantly increased student retention and degree completion, expanded online programs, and helped to increase faculty and student research. He also held the position of Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs in the University of North Carolina System, one of the nation’s largest, comprising 16 colleges and universities and one residential high school that together enroll some 235,000 students. In 2016 he served as the UNC System’s interim president.

Dr. Gonzales began his career as a psychiatrist who treated patients and conducted research in Georgetown University’s academic medical center before joining the National Institutes of Health, where he rose to become Director of the Division of Services and Intervention Research in the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), overseeing a $250 million research portfolio that included the largest-ever federally funded studies of the comparative effectiveness of different treatments for mental health disorders. After serving at NIMH, Dr. Gonzales worked as a Principal at Abt Associates, a consulting firm, advising private and public sector organizations on matters related to scientific research and health care, then returned to higher education as a dean at the University of South Florida, where his accomplishments included creating and leading a new college, the College of Behavioral and Community Sciences, which served nearly 3,000 students in nationally ranked academic programs and provided the second-largest source of research funding in the entire university.

Dr. Gonzales's research interests include mental health disparities among the Latinx population, the treatment of depression, and non-cognitive factors that influence college student success. He has received $15 million in research funding from sources that include the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Gates Foundation and published more than 50 scholarly papers and book chapters. Dr. Gonzales has been recognized with numerous awards and accolades, including the New York Hispanic Chamber of Commerce’s 2021 Educational Excellence Award, which will be presented today. He has also served on national committees for federal agencies such as the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and for higher education associations such as the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities.

Dr. Gonzales holds degrees from Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania Medical School and the University of Maryland. He received advanced training in psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.