Dr. Patricia Ramsey
Biographical Sketch of Dr. Patricia Ramsey
Dr. Patricia Ramsey was appointed by the CUNY Board of Trustees to serve as the sixth president of Medgar Evers College on March 22, 2021. She is the first woman president of Medgar Evers College.
Distinguished as a “National Role Model” by Minority Access, Inc., Dr. Ramsey is a leader and a scholar with a deep commitment to excellence and a passion for making a difference. Dr. Ramsey comes to Medgar Evers College from the Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF), where she served as senior executive fellow. Prior to TMCF, she served as provost and vice president for academic affairs at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the oldest degree-granting Historically Black University (HBCU) in the nation. For nearly 12 years, she served in various capacities at Bowie State University, a constituent institution of the University System of Maryland and the oldest HBCU in Maryland. At Bowie State, she was a tenured full professor and served as provost, interim president, and chair of the department of natural sciences. During her tenure at Bowie State, Dr. Ramsey was a thought leader behind the 149,000 square foot Center for Natural Sciences Mathematics and Nursing building. Designed and built with sustainability in mind, this $102 million project won a LEED Platinum certification.
Other positions that she has held include vice president for academic affairs at Shaw University and associate vice president for development at Norfolk State University. An experienced strategist and action-oriented leader, Dr. Ramsey negotiated a $1.3 million award after only three months as a fundraising officer at Norfolk State. With a formidable talent for swiftly assessing the situation and developing a plan of action, she created the infrastructure that resulted in $10 million in grants and contracts in less than two years at Shaw University.
Globally, Dr. Ramsey has impacted higher education on the continents of Europe and Africa. In Europe, she provided oversight for Bowie State’s graduate programs on the military base in Heidelberg, Germany, where she won front-page headlines in the military news for her bold position in allowing a five-year-old military dependent to stand proxy to receive the master’s degree for a deployed soldier. On the continent of Africa, Dr. Ramsey was one of four provosts in the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) delegation to Liberia, where she served in an education advisory capacity to the country’s leader President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. In Nigeria, Dr. Ramsey was instrumental in the success of a biotechnology training partnership between Godfrey Okoye University (GOU) in Enugu and Bowie State University. She also represented Lincoln University in Enugu, conducted a leadership workshop for the administration of GOU, and was an on-air radio guest at GOU-Radio.
A biologist by training, Dr. Ramsey has a research interest in the biological activity of plants used in folklore, has collected 110 species of Agave in the Sonoran Desert, and traveled a 450-mile span of highway collecting Sapium sebiferum (popcorn tree) leaves in the southeastern United States. Dr. Ramsey earned a Master of Science in Botany from Howard University, a Master of Arts in Biology from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in Biology from Georgetown University. Dr. Ramsey received her undergraduate degree from Norfolk State University, where she earned a Bachelor of Science in Biology Education. She completed executive leadership programs in AASCU’s Millennium Leadership Initiative (MLI), Harvard’s Institute for Educational Management (IEM), and the CIVIC Leadership Institute.
Dr. Ramsey is married to Dr. Roscoe Ramsey Jr, a physician and an ordained minister. They have three adult children and two grandchildren.
