Digital transformation in higher education is moving faster than institutional ethics can govern, leaving leaders adopting AI and data systems without frameworks for ensuring that innovation serves rather than replaces human connection. As Vice President for Institutional Effectiveness, Technology, and Innovation at Holy Family University, Green examined how institutional leaders can pursue digital transformation while keeping human-centered values at the center of technology adoption. His research proposes ethical frameworks that give practitioner-leaders a vocabulary for holding technological advancement and human values together in institutional decision-making. His work supplies the normative frameworks for technology governance that operational adoption guides consistently leave out.

Catholic colleges and universities are integrating AI into advising and academic life faster than they are building governance adequate to it, and almost none of that governance is grounded in the Catholic Social Teaching these institutions claim as their foundation. As Director of Advising Strategy, Assessment, and Policy at the University of Notre Dame, Qian is examining how senior leaders govern AI adoption and what it would take to align that governance with Catholic Social Teaching rather than with vendor defaults. Her research evaluates existing governance models against the relational, human-centered principles of the Catholic intellectual tradition, working toward policy recommendations leaders can put to use. Her work aims to give Catholic higher education leaders a mission-grounded framework for governing AI at the moment the technology is being adopted faster than the ethics to direct it.

As AI moves into higher education, the quality assurance and accreditation systems meant to safeguard standards have no shared framework for governing it, and the gaps differ sharply between European and American systems built on different regulatory logics. Drawing on experience gained while serving as a Higher Education Reform Expert with the National Erasmus+ Office (HERE) in Armenia and as a member of the country's national accreditation committee, Ohanyan is examining how AI governance is taking shape across EU and U.S. higher education, comparing supranational, national, and accreditation-agency documents from the EU AI Act through the U.S. regional accreditors. Her document analysis maps where governance frameworks already address AI, where they are silent, and how two differently structured systems are diverging in their answers. Her work aims to give quality assurance leaders and accreditors a comparative map of where AI governance exists in their systems and where the gaps leave institutions to improvise.

Collaborative Online International Learning promises global experience to students who cannot travel, but without deliberate design it can quietly reproduce the same linguistic and epistemic inequities as physical mobility, privileging English and Northern ways of knowing. As Senior Director of International Education at Babson College, with more than two decades in the field, Romito is examining how faculty themselves understand and build inclusive intercultural pedagogy into COIL, drawing on interviews with practitioners across institutions and national systems. Her research treats inclusive virtual exchange as a matter of faculty practice rather than platform, asking what global learning has to do to actually include the students it claims to reach. Her work aims to give internationalization leaders and faculty developers a grounded account of what inclusive COIL requires of the people who design it.

India's private higher education sector is expanding faster than the quality frameworks available to evaluate it, leaving institutional leaders without tools for building mission-centered universities in contexts where the standards are still being written. Drawing on case studies of four new private liberal universities, including his own Ahmedabad University, Sarwate examined what purpose-driven quality looks like where conventional accreditation metrics are insufficient and the definition of quality itself is contested. His Purpose-Driven Culture Framework gives institutional leaders in rapidly expanding systems a practical approach to building quality that starts with mission rather than metrics. His research moves the quality assurance conversation beyond compliance into institution-building.

Transfer credit policies for veterans are more variable, more consequential, and more poorly administered than most institutional policy reviews acknowledge. As Director for Academic and Veterans Affairs at the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education, Stone examined the institutional barriers that make veterans' degree completion more difficult than it needs to be, with state-level visibility into both the systemic patterns and the downstream effects on individual students. Her research holds institutions accountable for the complexity they have created in transfer policy, not just the complexity they inherited. Her work gives institutional leaders and state policy administrators a more precise account of where the transfer system breaks for veterans, and what owning that failure would require.

Technical and vocational education sits at the center of national workforce strategy, yet the policy choices that shape it are often driven by political shifts rather than rigorous evaluation. Abreu Malla conducted a qualitative case study of Ireland's Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) system, interviewing stakeholders across the private, public, and academic sectors to understand how TVET policy actually gets made and what allows it to translate into effective implementation. Her research found a system shaped by participatory policymaking and frequent change but lacking formal evaluation mechanisms, and it draws explicit lessons for other national systems, including her native Dominican Republic. Her work gives policy leaders a clearer picture of what makes vocational-education reform hold, and what makes it stop short.

Internationalization strategy built on the financial returns of student recruitment cannot sustain itself, and it sidelines the student-centered purpose that should anchor global engagement. Working from Mary Immaculate College in Ireland, Cowman examined how Ireland's new national strategy for international higher education can move beyond a financial-return logic toward a more holistic, student-centered model, drawing on interviews with nineteen senior administrators, government officials, students, and graduates alongside a strategic analysis of the national plan. Her research dismantles the financial-return rationale that dominates internationalization policy and identifies what implementation actually requires, from cross-governmental collaboration to reduced reliance on recruitment revenue. Her work gives institutional and system leaders a more durable basis for international strategy than market logic can provide.

Jesuit higher education professes a preferential option for the poor, yet its internationalization strategies often run on the same market logic as secular competitors, leaving the marginalized learners the mission names as central on the outside. As Chief Operations Officer of Jesuit Worldwide Learning and a veteran of three decades of humanitarian work in refugee camps and conflict zones, Borja examined this misalignment in Walking with the Excluded, analyzing the mission self-assessment reports of 18 Jesuit institutions alongside the virtual learning experiences of students living in conflict regions. His research proposes virtual inclusive internationalization, a mission-driven strategy that uses technology not for efficiency or revenue but for access, reaching students whom market-driven internationalization structurally leaves behind. His work gives Jesuit and Catholic leaders a concrete way to make internationalization serve the margins rather than the market, along with a proposed revision to the Mission Priority Examen that holds institutions accountable to it.

Higher education built for national majorities rarely reckons with the structural oppression that Indigenous communities experience, or with the leadership and collective agency those communities already exercise on their own terms. As Director of the Amazon University Program (PUAM) and a co-founder of the Pan-Amazonian ecclesial network REPAM, López Oropeza is examining structural oppression and intercultural higher education in the Sarayaku territory of the Ecuadorian Amazon, using Iris Marion Young's five faces of oppression to frame interviews with community, spiritual, and youth leaders. His research centers Indigenous leadership and collective agency rather than deficit, asking what higher education designed with the Sarayaku, not for them, would actually require. His work aims to give leaders of intercultural and peripheral institutions a framework for higher education that answers to Indigenous communities' own account of oppression and agency.

Higher education in regions facing brain drain usually frames the problem as retention, asking how to keep graduates from leaving. Drawing on 33 interviews across three Catholic universities in Nairobi, Kenya (Tangaza University, Hekima University College, and the Catholic University of Eastern Africa), Anyeh reframed the question entirely: how can institutions form graduates who stay civically committed to their communities regardless of where they live? Using a pastoral-circle methodology, his research developed the idea of portable civic responsibility, a durable commitment that travels with mobile graduates, and identified four relational capabilities that service-learning can cultivate to sustain it. His work gives Jesuit and Catholic institutions a framework for treating civic formation, not student retention, as the real answer to brain drain.

Most study abroad programs are built for students who already hold advantages, leaving Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and low-income students structurally excluded from international experience. As Advisor to the International Relations Office at Universidad del Magdalena, where 97 percent of students come from Colombia's lowest socioeconomic strata, Coronado built the Global Connection Program, one of the few Colombian education-abroad initiatives designed for marginalized students, and is now defending it against institutional threat while building a research blueprint others can use. Drawing on Bourdieu's social reproduction theory, Sen's capability approach, and Critical Internationalization Studies, his multilevel inquiry asks how Colombian institutions can build inclusive international partnerships aligned with social responsibility rather than market advantage. His work gives internationalization leaders across the Global South a model for education abroad that begins with the students the dominant model was built to exclude.

University transformation initiatives fail at high rates, yet most institutional leaders have no reliable framework for diagnosing why before a change effort collapses. Working from inside one of Russia's leading business schools, Nazaykinskaya examined why transformation initiatives fail in Russian universities and what leaders can do differently. Her research produced the Deficiency Navigator, a framework that enables institutional leaders to diagnose leadership gaps and assess organizational risk before change efforts stall. The Deficiency Navigator gives leaders in complex institutional environments a systematic self-diagnostic tool for identifying what their own organizations are missing before transformation fails.

Roughly one in five of the independent art and design colleges in the AICAD network has closed, merged, or restructured since 2014, yet the field lacks a comprehensive study of the factors stressing this sector. As Vice President for Institutional Research and Planning at Boston College, Hermano examined organizational and strategic factors associated with resilience, analyzing how common institutional metrics may not apply to special-focus colleges facing financial pressure from declining enrollment and rising operational costs. Her mixed-methods case study of twenty-one colleges maps what resilience looks like and presents a Studio-Based Institutional Resilience Model rooted in the adaptive qualities inherent in art and design pedagogy. Her work provides leaders at independent and specialized colleges with a blueprint for assessing their own institutional health and building resilient, mission-aligned organizations. 

Nigerian higher education, shaped by a top-down administrative culture, rarely treats student affairs as central to developing the whole student, leaving co-curricular support underbuilt at exactly the moment the region's student population is growing fastest. As Program Manager for Student Life in the Yale College Dean's Office and an American-educated Nigerian, Famutimi is examining how student-centered support and co-curricular opportunity shape the student experience across Nigerian institutions, drawing on surveys, focus groups, and administrator interviews. Her research treats student affairs not as administrative overhead but as a developmental practice, asking what a whole-student model looks like in a system built on different assumptions. Her work aims to give Nigerian and African higher education leaders evidence for building student services that form students rather than merely manage them.

Mission-driven universities face constant pressure to dilute the very identity that defines them, and mission drift usually advances well before leaders have the frameworks to name it or resist it. As Special Assistant to the Executive Vice President at Ignatianum University in Kraków, the only Jesuit university in Central and Eastern Europe, which recently removed its Catholic identity courses under market pressure, Jablonski is researching that identity crisis as it unfolds, examining how stakeholders contribute to or resist drift and what shared values can hold an institution together under secularization and enrollment pressure. His research examines how mission can be revitalized through the specific choices that either anchor or erode institutional identity. His work gives leaders of Jesuit and other mission-driven institutions a way to defend their distinctiveness at the moment market logic makes diluting it most tempting.

Non-tenure-track faculty now constitute the majority of the workforce in academic medicine, yet much of the labor that sustains their institutions goes unseen and unrecognized. As Assistant Vice Chancellor of Faculty Affairs at Rutgers Health, Fulks conducted a qualitative study of how invisible labor shapes the success and well-being of non-tenure-track faculty in academic medicine, analyzed through organizational and positive-psychology frameworks. Her research culminates in a communication model proposing how workload distribution could be redesigned to recognize the invisible labor these faculty carry. Her work gives health sciences administrators practical intelligence for retaining and sustaining contingent faculty at a moment when departure is accelerating and clinical education pipelines are at risk.

Faculty burnout research is fragmented across disciplines with incompatible definitions and measurement frameworks, leaving institutional leaders without the unified picture they would need to address chronic faculty stress at scale. As Associate Provost for Faculty Development at Marist University, Conyers conducted a systematic metasynthesis reconciling diverse terminologies — burnout, compassion fatigue, disengagement — and measurement approaches across fields into a unified framework for understanding faculty stress. His earlier research on international faculty and the politicization of tenure feeds into this synthesis, positioning the problem as structural rather than individual. His metasynthesis gives institutional leaders a comprehensive framework that the fragmented disciplinary literature has not, until now, provided.

Systemic inequity in higher education has deep historical roots, and institutions often struggle to navigate the intersections of these histories with professed commitments to equity and social justice. Drawing on her work as an advancement leader at Boston College, as well as academic work in art history and gendered leadership, Lockheardt traced two of those roots: women's challenges in pathways to university presidencies, anchored in a case study of Claudine Gay at Harvard; and how four universities (Brown, the University of Virginia, Harvard, and Georgetown) have navigated and commemorated their historical ties to slavery. Her research moves beyond diagnosis to institutional invitation, making a direct case, addressed to a sitting president, for what taking gender equity seriously as a presidential priority would actually require, particularly in Jesuit, Catholic context. Her work gives leaders a sharper account of where equity commitments break down in practice and why institutional history bears on fixing them.

International education associations claim to represent the global field, but the knowledge they produce and circulate reflects a Northern-dominated order that systematically devalues what Global South scholars know. Drawing on three decades of professional experience across institutions in Mexico, the United States, and Canada, Kauachi Legorreta examined whose ways of knowing get legitimized in international education policy and what gets lost when Global South scholarship must pass through associations not built to receive it. His research names epistemic injustice as a structural feature of international education's professional associations and conferences. His work gives field leaders a vocabulary and a diagnostic frame for identifying whose knowledge counts in international policy, and whose does not.