Chris Clemens is provost and chief academic officer of UNC-Chapel Hill. The Jaroslav Folda Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy, he joined the university as an accomplished astrophysicist in 1998.
Before becoming provost in 2022, Chris held many leadership roles at Carolina, serving as chair of the physics and astronomy department, senior associate dean for natural sciences and senior associate dean for research and innovation in the College of Arts and Sciences, and director of UNC’s Institute for Convergent Science.
His research interests include stellar seismology, interacting binaries, time-resolved photometry and spectroscopy, and astronomical instrumentation.
Chris held postdoctoral fellowships at Iowa State University and Caltech and earned a Doctor of Philosophy in astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin and a Bachelor of Science in astrophysics from the University of Oklahoma.