Dr. Maria Toyoda was appointed Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at Western New England in July 2021.

She was a Social Science Research Council Abe Fellow at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan, a Council on Foreign Relations/Hitachi International Affairs Fellow in Tokyo, and a visiting scholar at the Japan Bank for International Cooperation. She was also the recipient of a Monbusho Fellowship from the Japanese government during which she studied and researched in Osaka and Tokyo.

From 1997 to 2003, Dr. Toyoda was a Research Scholar at Stanford University’s Institute for International Studies (now the Freeman-Spogli Institute), the Asia/Pacific Research Center, and the Stanford Japan Center-Research in Kyoto. She received her A.B. in Human Biology with Honors from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. with Distinction in Government from Georgetown University.

Her research on the mechanisms of financial liberalization and policy-based financing have appeared in journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, Review of Financial Studies, and IMF Economic Review.

Her previous academic administrative experience was as Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at Suffolk University in Boston and as Associate Dean of Global and Interdisciplinary Studies at Villanova University in Pennsylvania.