 In June 2020, Dirks was named president and CEO of The New York Academy of Sciences.Dirks was born in Illinois but grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, where his father, J. Edward Dirks, was a professor at Yale University.When the latter received a Fulbright Scholarship in 1963 to teach at the Madras Christian College, the Dirks family relocated to Madras, where Nicholas's interest in Indian culture first formed.