University Administration
Leadership
As a builder and leader of interdisciplinary schools and colleges at U.S. and Canadian universities, I have sought throughout my career to create culturally agile educational communities and innovative learning environments that are uniquely designed to inspire grand collaborations and strategic partnerships between vastly different academic disciplines and research ecosystems.
With more than thirty years of experience, I understand the special requirements needed to sustain these institutions, celebrate and empower their gifts, and embrace their most difficult challenges. Though the needs and aspirations of each educational community I have served are highly individual, they share a common thread: they harness the limitless potential for creative and scholarly research, technological innovation, and cultural invention — all of which are more important now than perhaps at any other point in our lifetimes.
Driven by an unshakable belief in the value of creativity and collaboration, I have worked to provide faculty and students with important institutional supports, advocated for inventive new research opportunities and broadened access to external and philanthropic resources that are vital to igniting the engine of curiosity, fuelling the frontiers of imagination and sustaining an industry of creative daring in every community member, especially as we navigate the unparalleled uncertainties before us.
Our success comes from working closely together, and also with an engaged public to develop a shared vision and distinctive identities that respect the historical, cultural and disciplinary perspectives of each participating specialty, as well as boldly pioneering new knowledge and research propositions between them. When we leverage our differences, we build better futures. The adaptive mindset that is developed through collaboration creates an environment eager to realize greater inclusiveness, institutional cohesion, and genuine sustainability. It exposes students to a kind of inquisitive rigor that accelerates their success, promotes confidence when dealing with ambiguity, experimentation and change, and naturally inspires a boundless and inventive generosity that seeks to serve the public good.
Grounded in the belief that public universities are foundational to the success of thriving societies, research institutions are crucibles of original thought and living laboratories that abound with outsized opportunities for engagement, and whose outcomes are lived locally and reach globally. They provide vital partnerships to address some of the most complex and urgent problems of our time, and offer an unrivalled environment for mobilizing new knowledge that will help build a more resilient and verdant world.
Signature achievements that have enhanced institutional capacity to achieve strategic goals:
• Transitioned multiple institutions from historical incremental budget models to hybrid-RCM models
• Fundraised millions of dollars in gifts and contributions toward campus campaigns (including national laboratories, endowed Chairs, student scholarships, community partnerships, etc.)
• Planned and executed major capital construction projects
• Successfully recruited and hired hundreds of faculty, staff and administrative leaders, etc.
• Increased out-of-state and international applicant yields to historical institutional highs
• Increased four-year graduations rates to historical institutional highs
• Increased first-year retention rates to historical institutional highs
• Strategically increased revenues to manage structural and inline debt due to issues such as recurring ATB salary and benefit increases, debt service on buildings, etc.
• Developed and implemented inaugural strategic enrolment management (SEM) systems for multiple institutions
• Redesigned faculty recruitment and hiring processes for multiple institutions to yield higher BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and international applications
• Launched interdisciplinary research initiatives for faculty and students to support funding, research innovation and knowledge mobilization
• Secured multi-year faculty and student research and exhibition partnerships with major international arts institutions
Universities are also key partners in helping highlight and overcome structural biases and inequities that have long plagued our societies. Access to education transforms lives, personal and civic trajectories, and provides individuals much more than training and skills — it is an incandescent environment to challenge, evolve, and imagine our best futures. I feel enormous pride having intentionally invested my career in educational institutions that have strong social justice commitments, and where access, opportunity, support, and reward disparities are challenged and changed.
Commitment to equity and inclusion must extend farther than recruiting a diverse student body. Students must see themselves reflected in their educators. To diversify faculty and staff representation, I worked closely with all members across campus communities to help reimagine and redesign entire recruitment and hiring processes, launching innovative new interdisciplinary, diversity-focused faculty lines and emerging scholar initiatives, as well as creating ongoing opportunities for our communities to engage in difficult conversations across lines of difference through forums on bias, inequity and inclusivity.
In addition to serving on many leadership councils, strategic planning committees, and university task-forces, I remain dedicated to serving my wider communities. Over the past decade, I have had pleasure serving as an Executive Board Member of the Helen Carswell Community Engaged Research Fund, a multi-million-dollar, public university/non-profit partnership, that provides evidenced-based performing arts education, programming and training that supports increased academic persistence and degree attainment in underserved and at-risk communities.
I previously served as chair of the New and Virtual Media Directorate for the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI). The CFI awards more than $500M annually for pioneering research in media arts, social science, electrical engineering, and information technology. I also served as a member of the International Scientific Advisory Council, for GRAND (graphics, animation and digital media) a centrally-funded National Research Council of Canada, Networks of Centres of Excellence. I was a Founding Partner and Creative Director of the Cinematic Innovation Summit, a research, industry, academic, technology and culture summit, inaugurated at the renowned Dubai International Film Festival. I currently serve as a member of the Department of Computer Science’s Industrial Advisory Board in the College of Engineering at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia, and continue to serve in various capacities as an advisor and consultant for numerous technology related corporations, universities and governmental agencies, and on the boards of non-profit organizations.
My career reflects a pioneering sense of wonder and invention—whether engaged in the work of my own hybrid field of creative practice, or joyfully leading innovative learning communities that have supported thousands of others in their creative, technical and scholarly work. These efforts have earned the respect and trust of education, business, and community leaders, and drives me to continue finding groundbreaking ways to serve our vital academic institutions and the growing needs of our communities.