Charles Isbell

Charles L. Isbell, Jr. became the 11th Chancellor of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in July 2025. As Chancellor, he leads the state’s flagship land-grant university in its missions of academic excellence, innovation, and public engagement.

Chancellor Isbell is a computationalist, researcher, educator, and advocate for the idea that higher education creates opportunity, drives progress, and broadens our understanding of the world. His research has focused on artificial intelligence and machine learning, with an emphasis on how those systems interact with humans in responsible and inclusive ways. Isbell’s home as an Illinois faculty member is the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science in The Grainger College of Engineering.

Through multiple initiatives aimed at increasing participation in higher education, Isbell has become a respected leader in higher education reform. Although he is a computationalist by training, he values the critical thinking demanded of every discipline and considers it central to the purpose of education. He is an award-winning teacher who has been recognized internationally for his work in providing high-quality, accessible education at scale.

He is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery as well as an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has served on a number of advisory boards for the National Science Foundation (NSF), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the National Academies. He was the founding Executive Director for the Constellations Center for Education in Computing at Georgia Tech.

Isbell received his bachelor of science degree from Georgia Tech and continued his education at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. After earning his Ph.D. there in 1998, he joined AT&T Labs/Research. He returned to Georgia Tech in 2002 to join the faculty of the College of Computing, becoming dean in 2019. In 2023, he became Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Though born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Isbell’s earliest memory is arriving in Atlanta on a moving truck, so he thinks of himself as being from Atlanta. He and wife, Sheila D. Isbell, are parents to daughter Joni and son Cody.