Northern Illinois University
Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Bárbara González, Ph.D.
Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs and Interim Associate Vice President for International Affairs

Bárbara González serves as vice provost for Faculty Affairs and interim associate vice president for International Affairs at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois. She has worked for NIU since July 2017, previously serving as associate dean for Academic Administration in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and in several other roles, including founding chair of the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science. She has published research in Bayesian statistics, stochastic processes, random variable generation, visualization techniques, mathematics education, and leadership.

González has worked at higher education institutions for 21 years, including Roosevelt University—where she served as chair of the Department of Mathematics and Actuarial Science—Hofstra University, and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Responsibilities of the vice provost for Faculty Affairs include fostering faculty engagement; facilitating tenure, promotion, and sabbatical processes; establishing faculty development opportunities; and exploring ways to recognize faculty excellence and contributions. Other duties include leading academic labor relations efforts and ensuring that resources and staffing decisions align with and support the university’s strategic direction and priorities. Responsibilities of the associate vice president for International Affairs include serving as the senior international officer, providing strategic leadership for the university’s global engagement efforts, and overseeing international students and scholar services, study abroad programs, global partnerships, and international recruitment.

González earned her Ph.D. and M.S. in statistics at Cornell University and completed her bachelor’s degree in mathematics at the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas, Venezuela.

Selected Publications

B. González-Arévalo and A. Rodríguez (2025): A New Method to Generate Uniform Random Variates on the Unit Spherical Shell in R^d, Journal of Simulation.

B. González-Arévalo (2025): Faculty Affairs in research intensive universities: Supporting Faculty Success at Northern Illinois University. In Zeineldin, R. A practitioner's guide to faculty affairs. Routledge. Case study.

N. Shen, B. González-Arévalo and L.R. Pericchi (2023): Comparison Between Bayesian and Frequentist Tail Probability Estimates, The New England Journal of Statistics in Data Science, 1(2), 208-215, https://doi.org/10.51387/23-NEJSDS39.