Episode 43 - Rob Anderson Service-Minded Policymaking

11/21/22 • 46 min

Dr. Robert E. Anderson was appointed President of SHEEO on August 1, 2017. Anderson’s experience includes his most recent role as Interim Chief Academic Officer and Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs for the University System of Georgia. As a senior leader at USG, he addressed academic program approval, college completion initiatives, distance education, new delivery models, K-12 policy, teacher education, and grants administration and evaluation. Dr. Anderson helped restructure the system’s learning support paradigm, which resulted in significant completion gains within credit-bearing gateway courses.

Before his tenure at USG, Anderson served the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission for seven years as Vice Chancellor for Policy and Planning and Executive Vice Chancellor for Administration. In these positions, he directed Academic Affairs, Fiscal Affairs, Legal Affairs, Financial Aid and WVNET, the state’s computing infrastructure unit, for both the 10-college four-year system and the 10-college community college system. Previously, he was an administrator and instructor at Montreat College in Montreat, North Carolina where he taught religion, worked closely with first-year students and college retention efforts. Dr. Anderson’s scholarly focus has been in the areas of student access and financial aid policy with a particular interest in merit aid programs and their impact on institutional and student outcomes. A native of Augusta, Georgia, he holds degrees from The Citadel (B.A.), The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (M.Div.), and The University of Georgia’s Institute of Higher Education (Ph.D.).

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Episode 42 - Merrick Furst Deliberative Innovation

Merrick L. Furst, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor, runs commercialization and new venture creation and directs undergraduate programs and faculty development in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. He recently founded the anti-botnet startup, Damballa, Inc. Prior to GT he was a professor at UC Berkeley, president of the International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley and CEO of Essential Surfing Gear, Inc., which grew to 53 employees before being sold in 2000. He also helped establish a new high school in San Francisco. Earlier he was professor and associate dean in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. Dr. Furst is known for seminal research in algorithms, complexity theory and AI. Merrick co-invented probabilistic circuit analysis and planning graphs, which are considered among the most influential breakthroughs in the field of AI planning.

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Episode 44 - Nthabiseng Ogude Student Success in South Africa

Professor Nthabiseng Audrey Ogude is an Analytical Chemist, Science Educator and is currently Professor and Dean at the University of Pretoria’s Mamelodi Campus. She obtained a BSc degree Upper Class Honours majoring in Chemistry and Biological Sciences (Biochemistry, Parasitology and Entomology) at the National University of Lesotho, a MSc degree in Analytical Chemistry specialising in spectrophotometric methods of chemical analysis of Foods at the University of Nairobi and a PhD in Chemistry specialising in Chemistry Education at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Her PhD work was on the conceptions of entry level students and final year students of macroscopic and microscopic phenomena in electrochemical reactions and devising and implementing teaching resources (experiments and tutorials) to correct identified misconceptions. She was the first Black woman to receive a PhD in Chemistry at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1992. Professor Ogude was also the first woman to hold the positions of Vice-Chancellor of Tshwane University of Technology, Deputy Vice-Chancellor Teaching and Learning at the University of Pretoria and Deputy Vice-Chancellor Academic at Nelson Mandela University. She is currently Vice-President of the Pan African University Council. She has 30 years’ experience in tertiary education, 15 of which were in strategic leadership positions. She has taught at undergraduate (contact and distance) and postgraduate levels, supervised postgraduate students and published a number of papers in accredited and peer-reviewed journals.

Professor Ogude is passionate about student access and success and using data-informed approaches for holistic development of students. She is one of the first four South Africans who attended the Achieving the Dream Conference in 2010, which formed the basis of the Kresge Foundation’s national initiative Siyaphumelela (We succeed)now rolled out to all South African universities. She also serves as one of the first cohort of six South African Student Success Coaches that assists 19 universities in South Africa in improving undergraduate student outcomes especially among first generation students. As the immediate former Dean of the Mamelodi Campus, she oversees the Anchor Strategy of the Campus, the Mamelodi Collaborative. This a partnership with Rutgers University-Newark, which paved the way for the University of Pretoria to become the first African university to become part of the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities – i.e. higher education institutions that play a major role in strengthening of the fabric of their communities by aligning university goals with those of the neighbourhoods in which they are anchored, thus promoting educational opportunities, driving economic mobility and improving lives. Her research interests are in the areas of science / chemistry education, women in science, higher education policy and academic management leadership. She has a number of papers published in accredited journals and conference proceedings. She has developed a number of teaching and learning resources. She is currently the acting director of the University of Pretoria’s flagship project the UP: Pre-University Academy.