Amy Dittmar is a distinguished scholar with an extensive background in economics, finance and university administration. She is the provost, the executive vice president for Academic Affairs, a professor of economics in the School of Social Sciences and a professor of finance with Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business.
As provost, Dittmar oversees Rice’s academic enterprise, including direct reporting relationships for the deans of eight schools, dean of undergraduates, dean of graduate and postdoctoral studies, vice president for global, and other key leaders, including joint supervisory responsibility for the vice president for enrollment. Dittmar recently created a chief data officer overseeing business intelligence, reporting to the provost to support data-informed decision-making. She co-led a transformation of the university’s budget process and oversees the academic budget in partnership with the executive vice president for Operations, Finance and Support. Over the last two years, Dittmar has led the university’s strategic planning, which will establish the university’s direction for the next decade.
Dittmar is focused on opportunities for growth with an expanding student body, as well as more faculty members, capital projects, and staffing to support the university’s research and educational mission. She has hired more than 100 tenure-track faculty at all levels and leads a faculty expansion that will increase tenure-track faculty by 20%. She has increased support for graduate students by increasing stipends each year above inflation and providing more on-campus dining options. Dittmar also has added resources to attract and retain faculty.
To support the success of all students, she launched numerous programs, including Owl Access for first-generation and low-income students and the Office of Academic Support for Undergraduate Students, which provides peer-tutoring for 20 courses in a central drop-in study center and will soon house a new testing accommodation center.
Dittmar has strengthened Rice’s partnerships with the Texas Medical Center, with a particular interest in cancer and brain health initiatives. She oversees Rice Global, which has established and expanded partnerships in Europe, Asia and Latin America. She serves as president of Rice Global Paris, which oversees the Rice Global Paris Center and the Rice School of Architecture in Paris.
Prior to Rice, Dittmar held a series of top-level administrative roles at the University of Michigan. In 2019, she served as acting provost and executive vice president for academic affairs. Dittmar was the chief academic and budgetary officer with direct reporting relationships for the deans of 19 schools and colleges as well as other key staff. From 2020 and 2022, she served as senior vice provost. In that position, she oversaw policy decisions and implemented a wide range of strategic, academic and budgetary initiatives. From 2016 to 2020, she served as the vice provost for academic and budgetary affairs.
Dittmar held a number of other administrative and academic roles in Michigan. She served as a board member and secretary of the Michigan Health Corp., chair of a behavioral science research initiative task force, co-chair of the Student Mental Health and Well-Being Implementation Committee and a board member of the Michigan Mobility Transportation Center.
She earned her bachelor’s degree in finance and business economics from Indiana University and her Ph.D. in finance from the University of North Carolina. She is a scholar of corporate finance, governance and gender economics. Her research centers around studying the complex interactions between ownership, governance, individual preferences, and financial structure in public and private organizations to understand the role of incentives in decision-making and performance. She served as an associate editor at the Journal of Financial Economics, one of the top journals in the field. She also served as a councilor for the Society for Financial Studies, which oversees three top finance journals, including the Review of Financial Studies.
Dittmar was appointed the prestigious Michael R. and Mary Kay Hallman Fellow at Michigan from 2012–2015. In 2007, she was a finalist for the Brattle Prize, which is awarded for the best corporate finance papers in the Journal of Finance. She won the Law and Economics Consulting Group Award for Best Paper in Corporate Finance at the 2007 European Finance Association Conference, and also won Best Paper at the 2001 Financial Management Association European Conference. Dittmar has published numerous papers in top journals, and her work has been cited more than 10,000 times.
Before her career at the University of Michigan, Dittmar was an assistant professor at Indiana University and a financial analyst and real estate officer at First Chicago Corp. (now part of JPMorgan Chase).
Dittmar’s husband, Robert, is a professor of finance at Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business. Their daughter, Abby, is earning her Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from Florida State University. Their son, Graham, recently graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in New York and works at a resort in Vermont.