A political economist from NYU will become the next president of Drexel

Drexel University has tapped an Italian-born political economist who formerly worked at the University of Pennsylvania and currently serves as a dean at New York University as its next president.

Antonio Merlo, 61, dean of the faculty of the College of Arts & Science, will replace interim president Denis P. O’Brien on July 1. O’Brien became leader of the 22,100-student West Philadelphia university in September after John A. Fry, who led Drexel for 14 years, was named president of Temple University.

Merlo, who spent 14 years as a scholar and leader at Penn, where he also coached men’s water polo and led the team to three championship titles in the Mid-Atlantic Division of the Collegiate Water Polo Association, was chosen following the work of a search committee including trustees, faculty members, students, and administrators that lasted just under six months.

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“Dr. Merlo is the ideal leader to uphold Drexel’s values and guide the university into its next chapter,” Richard Greenawalt, outgoing chair of Drexel’s board of trustees, said in a statement. “His commitment to academic entrepreneurship and his proven success in bringing together faculty, students, scholars, and practitioners to address critical societal challenges are particularly vital as we move forward with strategic institutional priorities, including an academic transformation already underway, and focus on building long-term financial resilience.”

Merlo comes as Drexel, along with many other colleges, continues to cope with financial challenges as the college-going pool declines, faith in higher education wanes, and competition increases. In September, the school asked several deans to step down as part of consolidating two colleges and one of its schools into a new entity. It’s part of a larger academic restructuring, which also includes plans to move from a quarter system to a semester system over the next few years.

Later that fall, college leaders announced the school had experienced a 15% decline in first-year students and a $63 million operating loss. In November, Drexel laid off 60 employees, and another 155, or 3.6% of the workforce, opted for a voluntary retirement incentive program.

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The school at that time said it was aiming to come up with $150 million through cuts and revenue increases to regain a positive operating margin by 2027. It already had identified much of those cuts; some of the work may now fall to Merlo.

“I am absolutely thrilled to be asked to lead this institution, which I have admired from a distance for some time,” Merlo said in a 20-minute interview, shortly after the board approved his hire.

He cited the college’s co-op program that places students in paid work experiences as part of their core learning and the school’s willingness to adapt to changing conditions.

“I consider myself an academic entrepreneur,” he said. “I see myself as such in every leadership role I’ve had. This just feels like such a fantastic fit.”

At NYU, Merlo prioritized fundraising and “rightsizing staff,” Drexel said, noting that NYU’s Arts & Science school raised its most amount of money ever in 2024. Rightsizing, Merlo said, means trying to allocate the right talent to the right task and retargeting resources to where they are most needed.

“I’m an economist,” he said, “so I understand very well that concept that we maximize our objective functions subject to the constraints we face.”

Drexel, like most private colleges, declined to release Merlo’s salary, which will eventually become available through public tax forms. His predecessor, Fry, earned $2.2 million in total compensation in 2022, with a base salary of more than $886,000.

Merlo’s initial focus will be making sure Drexel’s projects, including its academic structural changes, get completed.

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Merlo isn’t the first president born outside the U.S. to lead Drexel. The late Constantine “Taki” Papadakis, who served as president from 1995 until his death in 2009, was born in Greece. Papadakis oversaw a major expansion of Drexel, transforming it from a struggling engineering school to a strong institution with a law school and medical school.

Born in a small town outside of Milan, he grew up in a working-class family and was a first-generation college student whose father, now 95, “still wonders when I’m going to get a real job,” Merlo said. He began playing water polo at age 12, and it grew into a passion, he said during a 2020 interview on a sports program. He got his undergraduate degree in economics and social sciences from Bocconi University in Italy in 1987, came to the United States in 1988, and earned his doctorate in economics from NYU.

He started his career as an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota in 1992 and worked there for six years before returning to NYU as an associate professor of economics. In 2000, he joined Penn, where he worked for 14 years, serving as an economics professor, chair of the department, and director of the Penn Institute for Economic Research. In 2009, he received the Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching.

In hiring Merlo in 2000, a Penn dean described him as one of the leading experts in the nation on the political economy, according to the Daily Pennsylvanian. In a 2013 story by the student newspaper, he was described as “gregarious, articulate, passionate and intense,” in regard to his coaching.

Rebecca W. Bushnell, emerita professor of English at Penn, worked closely with Merlo at Penn when she was dean of Arts & Sciences and he chaired the economics department.

“He is a wonderfully energetic person, full of ideas, ready to move new initiatives forward,” Bushnell said. “He’s also great at working with other people, looking at the other side of an issue, understanding things from another point of view.”

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He joined Rice University in 2014 where he was an economics professor and chaired the department, later becoming dean of its school of social sciences. There, he also worked with government agencies and nonprofit groups to set up a public policy research institute, according to Drexel.

Since 2019, he’s served as dean of NYU’s largest academic unit, overseeing three schools, as well as departments, research centers, institutes and language and cultural houses. During his tenure, five new centers fostering cross-disciplinary work have been started, as well as an office of research.

His research has explored the economic impact of public policy and he has written about how the economy affects voting and crime and “the career decisions of politicians.” Merlo also coached water polo at Rice and NYU, in addition to Penn, and three times has been named coach of the year.

Merlo said he learned important lessons from coaching that he has applied to every leadership he’s had: “Coaches don’t win championships. Teams win championships. The job of the coach is just to put together the best possible team and then guide them through and help them achieve their full potential.

“And you need the right team. How do you motivate and inspire people in doing their particular role on a team? … How do you make this a fulfilling and inspirational mission for each member of your team? That’s when magic happens.”

In addition to water polo, Merlo said he also enjoys the opera and cooking: “Risotto is my absolute specialty.”

Mike Lawrie, incoming board of trustees chair who led the search committee, called Merlo “a rising star in higher education. He has championed new initiatives and taken on leadership roles at every institution that he has served, while endearing himself to students, faculty, and staff along the way.”

Lawrie, who is founder and CEO of the Lawrie Group, a consulting and management firm, and founder, chair and CEO of TLG Acquisition One Corp., will replace Greenawalt as board chair, the school announced. Drexel’s Lawrie Advanced Global Leadership Program is named after him.

Staff writer Ryan W. Briggs contributed to this article.