Dr. John Harris joined Missouri S&T July 1, 2025, as Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs. He is responsible for overseeing all academic programs and functions of the three colleges: College of Arts, Sciences, and Education (CASE), College of Engineering and Computing (CEC) and Kummer College of Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Economic Development, Online Learning & Educational Innovation, University Libraries, Enrollment Management, Faculty Affairs, and the Center for Advancing Faculty Excellence (CAFE). Dr. Harris comes from Florida Tech as the Dean of the College of Engineering and Science. Previously, he was at the University of Florida (UF) for 29 years and was Chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department for 13 years. 

Harris earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees, both in electrical engineering, from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in computation and neural systems from California Institute of Technology. He completed a postdoctoral research fellowship with Dr. Tomaso Poggio at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, funded by the National Science Foundation’s Division of Advanced Scientific Computing.

In 1993, Harris joined the University of Florida as an assistant professor of electrical engineering. During his 29-year career at the University of Florida, he was promoted to associate professor, professor and chair of the department of electrical and computer engineering. He chaired the department for 11 years and led major gains in research funding, faculty growth and national rankings. In 2022, he joined Florida Tech as dean of the College of Engineering and Science, where he has focused on student success. He was also named the university’s Allen S. Henry Chair and Professor of Engineering.

Harris is a member of the Deans Council for the American Society for Engineering Education and on the editorial board for the Scilight Press Transactions on Artificial Intelligence.

Through his research in bio-inspired computation, he has graduated 36 Ph.D. students and 21 master’s degree students, published over 200 papers, and secured over $9 million in research funding, including $3 million as principal investigator. He holds 19 patents and has taught courses in circuits, electronics, signal processing, pattern recognition, biomedical signals, speech processing, Python and a special one-credit honors course in chess.