Farshid Hajir

Farshid Hajir serves as Senior Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He received his undergraduate degree with high honors from Princeton in 1988 and his PhD at MIT in 1993, both in Mathematics. Following appointments as Olga and John Taussky-Todd Instructor at Caltech, and as a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA, he held an assistant professorship at the California State University, San Marcos. Following a one-year appointment as Visiting Assistant Professor at UNC Chapel Hill, Hajir joined the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at UMass Amherst in 2002 as Assistant Professor. He was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure and Professor in 2006 and 2012, respectively.

Hajir’s academic expertise in algebraic number theory encompasses the study of units and class group of number fields, extensions of global fields with restricted ramification, the arithmetic of elliptic curves, and special values of L-functions. His other interests include coding theory, and the history of mathematics. He has taught a large variety of undergraduate courses at all levels, including Calculus, Linear Algebra, Mathematics for Elementary School Teachers, Abstract Algebra, as well as graduate courses on Algebra and Algebraic Number Theory.

Hajir’s administrative duties in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics began when he was appointed Undergraduate Program Director in 2006, a position he held for five years. He then served as Associate Chair and Chair. From 2017 to 2022, Hajir served as Senior Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, during which time he administered periodic program reviews, new degree program proposals, and a number of other projects, including interim appointments as Interim Director of University Without Walls (2020) and Interim Department Chair for Psychological and Brain Sciences (2021-2022). In his current role as Senior Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Education, he oversees a number of units including the Offices of Student Success, Registrar, Career and Professional Development, Community Engagement & Service Learning, and the Learning Resource Center.