associate professor

American  

noun

1. a teacher in a college or university who ranks above an assistant professor and below a professor.

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associate professor British  

noun

1. (in the US and Canada) a university teacher lower in rank than a full professor but higher than an assistant professor

2. (in New Zealand) a senior lecturer holding the rank below professor

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Other Word Forms

• associate professorship noun

Etymology

Origin of associate professor

First recorded in 1815–25

Example Sentences

"We show the potential for reversing age-related vision loss," says Dorota Skowronska-Krawczyk, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics and the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences.

From Science Daily • Apr. 22, 2026

Food-inspired fashion has filtered down from luxury designers like Dolce & Gabbana which embraced it late last decade, says Lorynn Divita, an associate professor of apparel design and merchandising at Baylor University in Texas.

From BBC • Apr. 22, 2026

“We’re integrated in the global economy like everyone else is,” said Brett Watson, associate professor of applied and natural resource economics at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 21, 2026

Elia Ferracuti is an associate professor of accounting and Rahul Vashishtha is a professor of accounting at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

From MarketWatch • Apr. 15, 2026

Graduate Dean George Birkhoff assured Ernest of Harvard’s high esteem for Oppenheimer “as a creative theorist” and confided that the university was willing to appoint him as an associate professor at $6,000.

From "Big Science" by Michael Hiltzik