Bobby Ahdieh Leaving Texas A&M to Lead Pace University – Fort Worth Magazine

Bobby Ahdieh Leaving Texas A&M to Lead Pace University  Fort Worth Magazine

Bobby Ahdieh will become Pace University president after helping advance Texas A&M–Fort Worth’s $1 billion-plus downtown innovation campus. Bobby Ahdieh, who helped turn Texas A&M's law school into the foundation for a much larger university presence downtown, is leaving the university to become president of Pace University in New York. Ahdieh will begin Jan. 1 as Pace’s ninth president, the university announced Tuesday. His departure takes one of the principal architects of Texas A&M–Fort Worth away from a project that grew from plans for a new law school building into a proposed innovation campus costing more than $1 billion. As chief operating officer of Texas A&M–Fort Worth, Ahdieh helped shape and advance a development intended to connect university research, private industry, workforce training, and economic development.

The campus brings together disciplines including law, engineering, business, and health sciences, with ambitions extending well beyond classrooms. For Fort Worth, the proposition has been both educational and economic: Give companies access to research and a workforce trained for their needs, while giving students a direct connection to potential employers. “I think the reason it's played out well is because it really was this happy confluence of win on the business side, win on the higher ed side, and win on the civic side,” Ahdieh previously told Fort Worth Inc. The idea was Ahdieh’s