Michael Amiridis

Michael Amiridis Overview

Michael Amiridis is a distinguished higher education administrator and professor, currently holding the position of the 30th president at the University of South Carolina. Before assuming this role, he served as the chancellor of the University of Illinois Chicago from 2015 to 2022.

Amiridis, born in 1963 in Kavala, Greece, is the elder of two sons of the late Dimitri and Aspasia Amiridis. Prior to relocating to the United States, he pursued his education at the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki. In 1991, he completed his Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and later became a U.S. citizen in 2000. Michael Amiridis is married to Ero Aggelopoulou-Amiridis, and the couple has two children.

His early career featured a three-year tenure as a research engineer at W.R. Grace and Co., an international manufacturer specializing in specialty chemicals and materials, based in Columbia, Maryland. During this time, he also spent a semester teaching at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. In 1994, he transitioned to academia, accepting the role of assistant professor of chemical engineering at the University of South Carolina.