Founding Dean of Social Sciences and Humanities
NEOM ERI
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia - Saudi Arabia
Founded in 2017, NEOM is designed to be the land of the future, where the greatest minds and best talents are empowered to embody pioneering ideas and exceed boundaries in a world inspired by imagination. Currently being developed across an area the size of Belgium in the northern part of Saudi Arabia, NEOM is being built to be an accelerator of human progress, embodying the future of innovation in business, liveability and sustainability. Backed by an initial investment offered by Saudi Arabia, NEOM will be an international project led, populated and funded from across world and its citizens will be a community with a mix of homelands, religions and backgrounds.
NEOM is focused on becoming a pre-eminent global location for establishing new technologies and associated industries. This development will encompass many future-facing sectors of activity spanning from education, through health and wellbeing, the digital world, energy, food, and water, to creative industries, tourism, and sport. It will be driven by world-class assets and knowledge creation based on exceptional access to data.
NEOM’s first University (NEOM U) will be a world class research university, that inspires and empowers the best minds: technology to better the world, innovation through the ‘lab of the future’ and life-long personalized development. It is one of the four pillars of the NEOM Education, Research and Innovation (ERI) sector along with EC-12 Education, the Talent Academy and the NEOM Education, Research and Innovation Foundation (ERIF).
With a leadership team already comprising world-renowned academics and visionaries, NEOM U will be focused on the fusion of the liberal arts with digital thinking, computing, and technology to solve humanity’s most pressing problems and to foster a prosperous, sustainable future for all. This foundational knowledge constitutes NEOM U’s Core Curriculum. Learning, research, discovery, and innovation across disciplines will provide the fabric for the mission of NEOM U. NEOM U’s Colleges, Schools, Divisions, Institutes will be interwoven into this fabric.
The Founding Dean of Social Sciences and Humanities will be a visionary, and inspirational leader who believes in the value and the opportunities offered by convergent learning and research, and will be ready, in close collaboration with the President, the Provost, the other Deans and the Directors of the Research Institutes of the Education, Research, and Innovation (ERI) Sector of NEOM, to design and launch NEOM U.
NEOM’s commitment to a “new future” for humanity puts the question “how do we make our world better?” on center stage. From sustainability and the environment, to the disruptive changes of the fourth industrial revolution to healthcare, education and every aspect of our daily lives, the insights and contributions of the humanists and the social scientists are most important in analyzing and understanding the opportunities and challenges involved and in debating and illuminating the options available to us for a human-centric answer to the question above. The Founding Dean will be a passionate advocate of the role of the humanities and the social sciences to the world’s heathy, sustainable, and prosperous future. The Founding Dean will assemble, inspire, and nurture a community of scholars, learners, researchers, and innovators, whose scholarly work and research pursuits will help shed light on the challenges we must understand, confront, and overcome to make the best out of the promise of the fourth industrial revolution. They will lead and oversee the establishment of partnerships with select international institutions to help launch the academic programs in their College. This is a career-defining opportunity for an academic leader who wishes to leave an unprecedented, prominent and long-lasting mark on the global education landscape.
A detailed candidate brief and information on how to get in touch can be found under ‘Related Documents’ on this site.