Associate professor in the context of "Academic ranks"

The term "docent" is derived from the Latin word docens, which is the present active participle of docere ('to teach, to lecture'). Becoming a docent is often referred to as habilitation or doctor of science and is an academic qualification that shows that the holder is qualified to be employed at the level of associate or full professor. The title of "docent" is conferred by some European universities to denote a specific academic appointment within a set structure of academic ranks at or below the full professor rank, similar to a British readership, a French maître de conférences (MCF), and equal to or above the title of assistant professor.

Docent is the highest academic title in several countries, and the qualifying criteria are research output that corresponds to 3–5 doctoral dissertations, supervision of PhD students, and experience in teaching at the undergraduate and graduate level.

Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an academic rank at universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a 'person who professes'. Professors are usually experts in their field and teachers of the highest rank.

In most systems of academic ranks, "professor" as an unqualified title refers only to the most senior academic position, sometimes informally known as "full professor". In some countries and institutions, the word professor is also used in titles of lower ranks such as associate professor and assistant professor; this is particularly the case in the United States, where the unqualified word is also used colloquially to refer to associate and assistant professors as well, and often to instructors or lecturers.

Academic rank (also scientific rank) is the hierarchical rank of a teacher, researcher or other employee in a college, high school, university or research establishment. The academic ranks indicate relative importance and power of individuals in academia.

The academic ranks are specific for each country, there is no worldwide-unified ranking system. Among the common ranks are professor, associate professor (docent), assistant professor and lecturer/instructor.

Senior lecturer is an academic rank in countries including the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, Germany, Israel and Sri Lanka. It is a faculty position at a university or similar institution, which is tenured (in systems with this concept) and is roughly equivalent to an associate professor in the North American system.

Assistant professor is an academic rank just below the rank of an associate professor used in universities or colleges, mainly in the United States, Canada, Japan, and South Korea.

Mohammad Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai (born 19 May 1949) is an Afghan former politician and economist who served as the 8th and last president of Afghanistan from 2014 when his government was overthrown by the Taliban in 2021.

Ghani was born in Logar, then part of the Kingdom of Afghanistan. After his grade-school education in Afghanistan, he spent much of his time abroad, studying in Lebanon and the United States. After receiving his PhD in cultural anthropology from Columbia University in 1983, he taught at various institutions and was an associate professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. For much of the 1990s, he worked at the World Bank. In December 2001, he returned to Afghanistan after the collapse of the Taliban government. He then served as finance minister in Hamid Karzai's cabinet. He resigned in December 2004 to become the dean of Kabul University. In 2009, Ghani ran in the 2009 Afghan presidential election but came in fourth.