Carol Folt will be the next chancellor of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, according to news reports.
Folt, 61, currently the interim president of Dartmouth College, will be UNC-Chapel Hill's first female chancellor, the News & Observer newspaper reports. The UNC-Chapel Hill chancellor is the chief executive of the 29,000-student campus, the flagship institution in UNC's 17-school system.
The UNC president, Thomas Ross, will present Folt at a meeting of the Board of Governors Friday afternoon for confirmation, according to The Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper.
Students showed excitement on Twitter Thursday night at news of Folt's selection.
Folt, previously a provost at Dartmouth, is serving a one-year stint as interim president of the Ivy League school after her predecessor, Jim Yong Kim, was tapped in 2012 to head the World Bank. She first became a faculty member at Dartmouth in 1983 in the department of biological sciences, according to The Daily Tar Heel.
Folt's biography on Dartmouth's website says she earned a her bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her Ph.D. from UC Davis.
Folt becomes the 11th chancellor of UNC-Chapel Hill, taking over for Holden Thorp, who held office since 2008 and has announced he'll step down at the end of this school year to become provost at Washington University in St. Louis.
Thorp's tenure was marked by multiple scandals, including probes of academic fraud involving star student athletes, federal complaints about how UNC handles sexual assaults on campus, hazing investigations and accusations of improper benefits for football players.
UNC-Chapel Hill is among the so-called public ivies -- top state-supported schools that provide an education rivaling Ivy League universities.
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