Michael M. Crow

Crow was born in San Diego, California, on October 11, 1955, the eldest of four siblings. His mother died when he was 9 leaving his widowed father, a sailor in the United States Navy, to raise the children on his own. As is common with military families, they moved many times during Crow's childhood. Crow was a Boy Scout who earned the rank of Eagle Scout in 1969. By the time he had graduated from Warren Township High School, he had attended 17 different schools.

Crow attended Iowa State University on an ROTC scholarship, graduating in 1977 with a Bachelor of Arts with majors in political science and environmental studies. Following his graduation, he worked for five years at research centers in Iowa and Illinois focusing on energy and policy research, while earning a Master of Public Administration from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Crow received his doctoral degree in public administration with a focus on science and technology policy from Syracuse University in 1985.

After earning his doctorate, Crow worked as an advisor to the Office of Technology Assessment in the United States Congress and was a Research Fellow on the Technology and Information Policy Program at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. He concurrently began his teaching career, first at the University of Kentucky and then at Iowa State University. He joined the Iowa State faculty in 1988 as an Associate Professor and Director of its Institute for Physical Research and Technology. By 1991, he had become an Institute Professor there and had also worked as a consultant for the United States Department of Energy and Columbia University.

Crow left Iowa State in 1991 to serve as Professor of Science and Technology Policy at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. He served as executive vice provost at Columbia University from 1998 to 2002.

In 2002, Crow was appointed the 16th president of Arizona State University. In 2006, he was made a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and in 2008 received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Iowa State University. Crow celebrated the 20th anniversary of his presidency in 2022, at which time the Arizona Board of Regents named him the inaugural Regents Distinguished President of Arizona State University. As president of ASU, Michael Crow proposed the New American University model for ASU.

Crow is married to Sybil Francis, who holds a Ph.D. in political science and government from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is CEO of the Center for the Future of Arizona, which she co-founded with Lattie Coor in 2002. The couple has one daughter and resides in Paradise Valley, Arizona. Crow has a son and daughter from a previous marriage.