On a Tuesday morning in September, one of the first days under 100 degrees since May, Marta Meana was in her office in Hospitality Hall. She didn’t have to be on campus but "I’m not a work-from-home person," she confessed.
Meana reflected on her upcoming retirement. "It’s bittersweet," she acknowledged. Then she paused, glanced around, and began to smile. “This is where I’ve come for nearly 30 years.”
She is retiring in December, but not without leaving an indelible mark as a Rebel — from groundbreaking research in women’s sexual health, to tripling the size of the Honors College as its dean, to securing sustained investments in students, colleagues, and staff — earning her fans for life.
When she served in an interim role as president from 2018 until 2020, she led the university through as much institutional change as one could imagine:
- UNLV was named a top-tier research university by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education building upon the work of many.
- The Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine was granted full accreditation status by the Liaison Committee of Medical Education.
- Construction on the Fertita Football Complex was completed after a final push to secure philanthropic funds.
- The Howard R. Hughes College of Engineering continued to raise funds in support of the Advanced Engineering Building.
And then, as she was making transition plans to turn the role over to a permanent successor, the pandemic hit. With Meana at the helm, UNLV and its leadership absorbed, in real time, a constant stream of evolving information about how to protect students and faculty from the coronavirus, including how the virus spread, how deadly it might be, and who it impacted. There were questions of how to serve Nevadans as medical and public health professionals, how to grieve the loss of colleagues, family, and friends, and how to continue providing a quality education and cohesive college experience to tens of thousands of students remotely.
It was a lot. These weren’t challenges Meana sought for herself, either: “Opportunities chased me down,” she said of her foray into administration. “I did not aspire to them, so every one [of them] was unexpected."
Inside the university and within the community at large, those who admire Meana say it was her skill and temperament as a leader — including solid relationships, a mission focus, intelligence, and a steady hand — that made all the difference in her success. A “firecracker,” a “real innovator,” a “... powerhouse,” and “masterful at balancing warmth and toughness” are just some of the adjectives colleagues, donors, and former students used to describe her.
Meana laughs about being considered tough and says she doesn’t see it. But, there is both a musculature and nimbleness to her personality, a confidence and sense of command in the way she speaks and navigates conversations. She undoubtedly holds her ground.
Groundbreaking Research
Meana credits her father, a self-educated man, an immigrant to Montreal, Quebec, from Madrid, as her greatest teacher in life. He seeded her curiosity to learn. She recalls that when she would announce she “hated” some subject as a child, her father would say, “We hate what we don’t understand.
“That became my mantra at a very young age,” Meana said. “And he was right — there is nothing I made the effort to understand that I didn’t end up liking. That was both a great intellectual and humanistic lesson.”
Fresh out of high school, as an undergraduate at McGill University, Meana studied English literature, then went on to earn a master’s degree in literature. She took a job as a copywriter in an advertising agency after graduating, then founded and built her own small but successful marketing firm, which included Air Canada as a client. It could have been a lucrative career, but ultimately that ambition didn’t align with Meana’s values and purpose — to be of service and alleviate suffering. She craved a more altruistic life. So, she closed up shop and went back to school for a second bachelor’s degree in psychology, also at McGill, eventually entering its Ph.D. program.
Irving Binik, a professor of psychology, said taking Meana on as a student in his laboratory at McGill was one of the best decisions he’s ever made.
When Meana was searching for a research topic as a doctoral student, Binik suggested several. The one she picked for her dissertation developed into an area of research that Binik’s lab would explore for the next 30 years: dyspareunia, or pain that occurs during intercourse for women. Although prevalent, it previously had been trivialized and dismissed by both physicians and psychologists alike as psychosomatic.
Meana’s stance — that women’s pain was real — was radical at the time.
“Marta’s work became one of the first modern studies on the topic,” Binik continued. “If there were 10 research papers that year on women’s pain, I would have been surprised. Today, there are hundreds every year. Marta’s work changed the paradigm.”
Over the years, Meana’s contributions to the field earned her numerous awards, including the Masters and Johnson Lifetime Achievement Award.
Her research also began to transcend the confines of the academy to influence contemporary culture, launching her into the public eye with an appearance on Oprah in 2008, , and citations and as recently as . The door opened for Meana to become an educator in the public sector, the likes of organizational psychologist Adam Grant or clinical psychologist Susan David today, but she decided not to walk through it. “I’m not in this to become a celebrity,” she is quoted as saying in a UNLV article published after her Oprah appearance.
Meana’s interest in research over a public persona culminated in the publication of two books, two edited volumes, 34 chapters, and more than 50 peer-reviewed articles.
Moving into Leadership Roles
Meana’s foray into university leadership might have surprised her — but it didn’t shock others. When Meana was first on the academic job market — following a clinical internship at UC San Diego and a postdoctoral fellowship in women’s health at the University of Toronto — she almost passed on the opportunity to interview with UNLV. Once again, her father was the voice of reason, encouraging her to visit Las Vegas even though she already had tenure-track offers from other more established institutions in hand.
She arrived on campus and was intrigued. UNLV was a place for builders — a place where she could make an impact, as opposed to a legacy institution that would leave little room for creativity and an entrepreneurial spirit. Not to mention, Nevada had very few psychologists, and the need for practitioners and leaders in the field was tremendous. Meana was convinced. She joined the department of psychology in 1997 and began building its doctoral program in clinical psychology.
In 2011, then UNLV president Neal Smatresk invited Meana to take on her first administrative role as his special assistant. The assignment, a three-year, rotating appointment, provided up-and-coming faculty members the opportunity to work on behalf of the institution overall. Honored, intrigued, but also a little hesitant, Meana proposed she serve for one year only, then return to her research. Smatresk agreed.
Opportunity came knocking again when, in 2012, Meana was tapped to serve as dean of the Honors College, a role she held for six years. Under her leadership, college enrollment tripled. Meana secured the college’s first full-time faculty positions, and channeled her skills as a marketer to build the college’s reputation for academic excellence and community engagement. Today, the Honors College has roughly 1,200 students in total, from freshmen to seniors.
“She created energy and momentum, particularly in terms of recruitment and retention,” said Lisa Menegatos, the current dean of the Honors College. “We just had our largest incoming class ever at 365 students. That wouldn’t have been possible with all the work she had done.”
Major philanthropic donors, including Diana Bennett, a second-generation casino operator and co-founder of Paragon Gaming, began to take notice: “Every student was important to Marta, and she knew each of them by name,” Bennett said.
As dean, Meana shared with Bennett that honors students in their junior and senior years are particularly vulnerable to dropping out. Bennett, in response, created a scholarship to support them and funded it for five years. The program also established a pipeline through which upper-class students mentored freshmen and sophomores.
Meana ensured that the program experience was meaningful to everyone involved, including Bennett, who still has framed group photos of her scholars, one for each cohort. They’re cherished possessions. One year, the scholars named a star in the sky after their benefactor — “It was incredibly special,” Bennett said. “I’ve never had anyone else take that kind of time and effort.”
Support and Investment in Students
Ask Meana what she is proud of over the course of her career, and she begins beaming with pride — it’s the students, especially the doctoral students in clinical psychology whom she mentored to become confident, capable scholars. Many of Meana’s former students now provide much-needed services in Las Vegas too: “They have changed the mental health landscape in this town,” she said.
Lindsey Ricciardi is one of them. Ricciardi said Meana was the first person she spoke with from UNLV. She was working in a psychiatric hospital in Maine when she got a phone call from Meana. “I vividly remember where I was standing during that first conversation,” she said. “I remember feeling incredibly excited. Marta is so personable, energetic, fun, and warm.
“Like everything Marta does, she gives 110 percent,” added Ricciardi, who eventually completed a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at UNLV. “When it came to writing, I remember jokes about how it would look like a small animal had been bludgeoned on my papers because of all the red ink. But as painful as it was to get my work to the caliber Marta expected, the blessing was that I always knew if I passed her expectations, I’d be golden.”
Ricciardi’s interests were in health-related psychology, so when Meana got a call from a local bariatric surgeon, curious to partner with UNLV on research into why some patients who underwent bariatric surgery achieved better results than others, she invited Ricciardi to take it on. “That phone call launched my entire career,” Ricciardi said.
With Meana’s guidance, Ricciardi took a non-traditional approach to her research. Instead of examining statistical data, she launched a qualitative study, conducting intimate interviews with bariatric patients to develop her theories: “I hadn’t really heard of that approach in clinical psychology,” she said.
Meana taught Ricciardi to validate patients’ experiences, including their pain, physical or psychological. “We would role-play situations, which was something only Marta did with us,” Ricciardi said. “When it came to interviews for internships, she made us practice those, too. That was intimidating, but so helpful. Those are skills that have stuck with me.”
Today, Ricciardi is the founder of a thriving practice, The Eating Disorder Institute of Las Vegas. Her doctoral research culminated in a book published in 2008, "Obesity Surgery: Stories of Altered Lives," co-authored by Meana.
Graduate students weren’t the only ones benefiting from Meana’s attention. Even as dean, Meana would reserve office hours for honors students to talk. She promoted it as mentoring in “professional development,” but she did, in fact, channel her skills as a therapist, discussing with students whatever challenges they were facing. She was booked months in advance.
“No matter what role Marta had at UNLV, her focus was always the students and the institution — not herself,” observed Menegatos, who invited Meana to teach an honors class when she returned to faculty after serving as UNLV president. Meana agreed, quickly got up to speed on the new technology required to teach online, and created a course students loved. “Even though she had been president, she wasn’t arrogant about it,” Menegatos continued. “She was still grounded, down-to-earth, and student-centered. She continued to go above and beyond.”
The Presidency
In 2018, the Nevada Board of Regents appointed Meana to serve in an interim role as UNLV president, replacing departing president Len Jessup, while a national search for a permanent replacement got underway. She was selected from a small number of internal candidates.
Greg McKinley, at that time chief executive of Cragin and Pike, a strategic insurance and risk management firm, stepped into his volunteer role as chair of the UNLV Foundation Board of Trustees just as Meana assumed the presidency.
“She was definitely the right person for the job, and everybody wanted her to be successful,” McKinley said, adding that this was “not an optimistic” time for the university overall. Jessup’s departure, amidst tension with the regents, was a contributing factor. “Marta came in and basically said, ‘I’m not going to act like an interim, and I’m going to do what needs to be done.’ And everyone rallied behind her.”
Case in point: One day Meana called McKinley and explained that the university did not have the funds to finish building the Fertita Football Complex. The complex, announced in 2016, was supported with a $10 million charitable gift from Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta, but construction costs increased from the estimated $22.25 million to nearly $35 million. Meana’s idea was to approach the UNLV Foundation’s trustees for a $2 million gift. Then she, McKinley, and others would appeal to the who’s who of UNLV donors with an ask: help us match the Fertittas’ generosity.
“She took it on her shoulders to make sure it was finished,” McKinley said.
"She hit the ground running,” agreed Bennett, by this time the incoming chair of the UNLV Foundation’s trustees. “She handled it better than most people would,” Bennett added, noting how much institutional change and stressors Meana contended with.
Don Snyder, a philanthropist and Las Vegas executive, observed Meana from a singular vantage point: “I watched with admiration and pride at the job she did as president,” Snyder said. After careers in banking and gaming, Snyder stepped in as dean of the William F. Harrah College of Hospitality in 2010. In 2014, he served as UNLV president during a period of leadership transition, the same role that Meana would fill four years later.
“She clearly embraced the internal role of president on campus, but also, and very importantly, the external role with donors and the community,” Snyder said. “There was angst and uncertainty created by the departure of President Jessup, who had earned broad-based support. And then, there was the need to navigate the pandemic.
“She was a true leader and earned the respect of all of us who witnessed her work,” Snyder added.
Leaving a Legacy at UNLV
Regarding the future of UNLV, Meana said her hope is that the university “becomes a national example of how transformative research and innovative teaching can co-exist in the service of world challenges and social mobility.”
In other words, that UNLV continues to pursue a world-class research agenda while also serving a student body that is among the most diverse, urban, and non-traditional of all higher education institutions in the US.
“Demographically,” Meana added, “we look like the future of our country, so we have an opportunity to demonstrate how bright that future can be.”
As endings go, there’s a degree of wistfulness about her retirement and the gap she will leave. “My only regret about her well-deserved retirement is that UNLV and the community lose the direct benefit of her background, intelligence, leadership, and impact,” Snyder said. “We will miss her.”
True to character, Meana is planning for a retirement filled with purpose. While future plans are still taking shape, she anticipates some consulting, more leisure travel, and perhaps another book. She’ll also spend time with her 98-year-old mother, Lourdes.
“I loved helping build the clinical psychology doctoral program. I loved rebuilding the Honors College. I loved deconstructing diagnoses that were harmful to women and then constructing an approach that was helpful,” Meana said.
“I loved those moments of building something — and I might build something still.”
