IRVINE, California — Endowed visiting professorships are vital for research-oriented institutions. A program that attracts leading scholars to the American University of Armenia (AUA) can be particularly impactful as the University expands its research capacity and degree offerings. For Drs. Ara and Alice Apkarian, the case is also personal: both benefited from the enrichment brought by visiting professors during their graduate studies. For Ara, that experience led to lifelong research collaborations, and he has since served as a visiting professor at several universities globally.
Dr. Ara Apkarian likes to tell people he started school at two and a half years old and has never left. A graduate of AGBU schools in Syria and Lebanon, Dr. Apkarian arrived at USC in 1973 and received a Ph.D. in chemistry from Northwestern University. It was at Northwestern where he met his wife Alice, a fellow Ph.D. student and the daughter and granddaughter of academics from Kalamazoo, Michigan. The couple spent their postdoctoral years at Cornell, and eventually settled in California, where Ara joined the faculty at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). He is now Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at UCI. The couple married at St. James Armenian Church in Evanston in 1980.
Alice’s career took her toward teaching at the community college level and, later, toward volunteer work introducing schoolchildren to environmental science and middle school girls to math. Their daughter, Naneh, also followed the family’s gravitational pull toward the classroom, earning her Ph.D. at UC San Diego and San Diego State University, where she now teaches mathematics and statistics as a member of the Center for Research in Mathematics and Science Education. “Perhaps one day, she will share her expertise as a visiting professor at AUA,” her parents note.
Their reasoning to establish Drs. Alice and Ara Apkarian Endowed Visiting Professorship is architectural before it is sentimental. The $500,000 commitment represents a significant investment in AUA’s academic future, creating a lasting source of support to bring leading scholars to Armenia and enrich the University’s research and teaching. “Even the largest established institutions cannot maintain in-house expertise across all fields, especially as disciplines are undergoing rapid change,” Ara and Alice explain. A visiting program solves a different problem: it lets expertise travel to where it is needed, on a timeline shorter than a hiring cycle, calibrated to whatever a department most urgently lacks.
Underneath the institutional logic sits something more personal. Both Ara and Alice experienced, as graduate students, what a visiting scholar can do to a young researcher’s sense of what is possible. For Ara, some of the most consequential relationships of his academic life began with visiting professors. Some became lifelong collaborators. Decades later, that experience shapes how Ara and Alice view visiting professorships at AUA: the ability to bring leading scholars to Armenia, connect them with students and faculty, and create relationships that can extend far beyond a single visit.
The Apkarians describe AUA as one of Armenia’s greatest successes since independence, a university conceived in the aftermath of the 1988 earthquake and founded on the day the country declared its independence. Its affiliation with the University of California and English-language instruction helped prepare a generation of leaders for a country that had, almost overnight, become responsible for governing itself. In the decades that followed, AUA has grown alongside Armenia into an institution the Apkarians believe has the potential to stand among the world’s leading universities.
That belief is not new to them. The Apkarians have supported education in both the United States and Armenia for years. After the 44-day Artsakh war in 2020, they doubled down on their support for education inside Armenia, a decision rooted in the idea that a country under existential pressure needs its universities more, not less. What draws them to AUA in particular is its accessibility to students from every region of the country and its need-blind admissions policy, as well as something harder to quantify but easily recognizable to two lifelong academics: the same ethos and values they have embraced at UCI for decades.
Founded in 1991, the American University of Armenia (AUA) is a private, independent university located in Yerevan, Armenia, affiliated with the University of California, and accredited by the WASC Senior College and University Commission (WSCUC) in the United States. AUA provides local and international students with Western-style education through top-quality undergraduate and graduate degree and certificate programs, promotes research and innovation, encourages civic engagement and community service, and fosters democratic values. AUA’s Office of Advancement stewards the University’s philanthropic efforts exclusively for educational purposes.