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

See Examples For:

associate professor

Kevin Bryan, an associate professor at the University of Toronto specializing in innovation, defended Anthropic and said the fears about the risks of frontier intelligence being open source are real and widely shared.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 29, 2026

Dr Pascal Vrticka, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Essex, has spent nearly two decades studying attachment.

From BBC ● Jul. 28, 2026

"For many years, aging research has focused on identifying factors that increase the risk of disease," added co-first author Ignazio S. Piras, PhD, associate professor in TGen's Early Detection and Prevention Division.

From Science Daily ● Jul. 25, 2026

Nicholas Vargas, an associate professor at UC Berkeley and one of the study’s co-authors, said that researchers hadn’t sought out to analyze the mental health impact but that it came up repeatedly.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 22, 2026

The second was Yale’s complacent refusal to accommodate its sought-after assistant professor’s request for a promotion to associate professor.

From "Big Science" by Michael Hiltzik