Michael Vincent Drake is an American university administrator and physician who is the 21st president of the University of California. Earlier, from 2014 to June 2020, he was the 15th president of The Ohio State University. He was the chancellor of the University of California, Irvine from 2005 to 2014, and has also served as vice president for health affairs for the University of California system. He is the first African American to head the University of California.

The University of California (UC) is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. Headquartered in Oakland, the system is composed of its ten campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz, along with numerous research centers and academic abroad centers. The system is the state's land-grant university. Major publications generally rank most UC campuses as being among the best universities in the world. In 1900, UC was one of the founders of the Association of American Universities and since the 1970s seven of its campuses, in addition to Berkeley, have been admitted to the association. Berkeley, Davis, Santa Cruz, Irvine, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and San Diego are considered Public Ivies, making California the state with the most universities in the nation to hold the title. UC campuses have large numbers of distinguished faculty in almost every academic discipline, with UC faculty and researchers having won 71 Nobel Prizes as of 2021.