Jones became chancellor of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on September 26, 2016. He previously served as president of the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY) and is an experienced and accomplished scientist and research university leader. A Georgia native, Jones earned a bachelor’s degree in agronomy from Fort Valley State College, a master’s degree in crop physiology from the University of Georgia, and a doctorate in crop physiology from the University of Missouri, Columbia. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a fellow of the American Society of Agronomy and the Crop Science Society of America. He began his academic career as a faculty member at Minnesota in 1978 and became an internationally respected authority on plant physiology.

Throughout his distinguished, 34-year career at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus, Jones held several progressively responsible positions at the Big Ten institution. While senior vice president for system academic administration, Jones had administrative and budgetary responsibilities for the four constituent campuses in Duluth, Crookston, Morris and Rochester and the offices for public engagement, equity and diversity, Extension Service, Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Stations, information technology and human resources. He played a leadership role in establishing a new four-year campus in Rochester and the nation’s first urban research and outreach/engagement center (UROC) designed to help find a solution to complex challenges in economically depressed urban communities. The center was named in Jones’ honor in 2015.

At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Jones serves as chancellor of the state’s flagship, land-grant university and vice president in the University of Illinois system, with universities in Chicago and Springfield. At Urbana, Jones’ tenured faculty home is in the Department of Crop Sciences, College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES). Jones is the first African American scholar appointed as Urbana chancellor since the office was created in 1967.

As the Interim Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Provost Designate, Dr. Bernhard oversees the campus’ academic programs, policies, and priorities, which are designed to ensure the quality of the educational experience for students and to sustain an environment that encourages and supports academic excellence through diversity, inclusion, and free inquiry, debate, and speech. In this role, he works closely with the chancellor, the other vice chancellors, the deans of academic colleges and other units, academic staff, the Senate of the Illinois campus, and various committees in setting overall academic priorities for the campus.

William holds a B.A. in government from Cornell University, and a M.A. and Ph.D in political science from Duke University. His most recent book, Legislative Style (University of Chicago Press, 2018), investigates how members of Congress allocate their time and effort across different activities. His research examines the strategic choices of political actors, including how parties manage candidate nominations, and how the potential for immigration across borders shapes foreign policy choices. His work has been recognized with several best paper awards, including the 2015 Patrick J. Fett Award and the 2014 Jewell-Lowenberg Award.

Prior to being named Interim Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Provost Designate, Dr. Bernhard was the Executive Vice Provost for Academic Affairs. He was previously Associate Provost for Faculty Development from January 2015 through May 2017, as well as Interim Executive Associate Dean for the College of Media from May 2016 through May 2017, when he was appointed Vice Provost for Academic Affairs. Before joining the Provost’s Office, he served as the Head of the Department of Political Science (2007-15). In 2014-15, he was an Associate in the Center for Advanced Study.

Reitumetse Obakeng Mabokela is the Vice Provost for International Affairs and Global Strategies (VPIAGS) and Professor of Comparative and International Higher Education. Prior to joining the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, she served as the Assistant Dean for International Studies in the College of Education and Professor of Higher Education in the Department of Educational Administration at Michigan State University. Originally from South Africa, she received her BA in Economics from Ohio Wesleyan University, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. She pursued and graduated with a Master’s in Labor & Industrial Relations and Ph.D. in Educational Policy Studies, both from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

A former Fulbright New Century Scholar (2006), Professor Mabokela’s research examines experiences of marginalized populations and aims to inform institutional policies that affect these groups within institutions of higher education. She has devoted a significant part of her career studying higher education issues in developing and transitional countries. She is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of seven books and has published extensively in national and international journals.

Dr. Allan E. Goodman is the Chief Executive Officer of the Institute of International Education, the leading not-for-profit organization in the field of international educational exchange and development training. IIE conducts research on international academic mobility and administers the Fulbright program sponsored by the United States Department of State, as well as over 200 other corporate, government and privately-sponsored programs. Since its founding in 1919, the Institute has also rescued scholars threatened by war, terrorism, and repression. Trustees, students, and scholars touched by IIE have won 108 Nobel Prizes.

Previously, Dr. Goodman was Executive Dean of the School of Foreign Service and Professor at Georgetown University. He is the author of books on international affairs published by Harvard, Princeton and Yale University presses. Dr. Goodman served as Presidential Briefing Coordinator for the Director of Central Intelligence in the Carter Administration. Subsequently, he was the first American professor to lecture at the Foreign Affairs College of Beijing, helped create the first U.S. Academic exchange program with the Moscow Diplomatic Agency for the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs, and developed the diplomatic training program of the Foreign Ministry of Vietnam. Dr. Goodman has served as a consultant to the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the United States Information Agency, and IBM. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and serves on the selection committees for Rhodes and Schwarzman Scholars and the Yidan Prize. He also serves on the Council for Higher Education Accreditation International Quality Group Advisory Council and the Board of Trustees of the Education Above All Foundation.

Dr. Goodman has a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard, an M.P.A. from the John F. Kennedy School of Government and a B.S. from Northwestern University. He also holds honorary degrees from Chatham, Susquehanna, and Toyota universities; Richmond, The American International University in London; Dickinson, Middlebury, Mount Ida, and Ramapo colleges; The State University of New York, and the University of York. He has received awards from Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, South Florida, and Tufts universities, the Légion d’honneur from France, and the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit. He was awarded the inaugural Gilbert Medal for Internationalization by Universitas 21.

Dr. Flávia Rossi MD, Ph.D. is a Clinical Pathologist and Clinical Microbiology specialist. She received her MD (1985) and Ph.D. degree (2002) from the Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, and her thesis was related to Telemedicine and Microbiology Education.

Since 1999, she has been the Medical Director of the Clinical Microbiology Laboratory Division of the Hospital das Clínicas (HC) Complex working with medical students from 10 different hospitals, within the Faculty of Medicine of the University of São Paulo (FMUSP), Brazil.

She participates as an active member of the Infection Control and Stewardship Team from HC-FMUSP. Her research areas include clinical microbiology, infectious diseases, and clinical pathology with publications related to bacteria resistance surveillance in national and International projects. She is the author of various prestigious articles including a NEJM publication.She is a voluntary member of the Clinical Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) and the American Society of Microbiology (ASM).

Prof. Philip Cotton is Director, Human Capital Development at the Mastercard Foundation. He also heads the Foundation’s Scholars Program—an initiative dedicated to developing Africa’s next generation of transformation leaders and the largest of its kind. The Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program allows students whose talent and promise exceed their financial resources to complete their education, while investing in their leadership potential.  With a vision that education is a catalyst for social and economic change, the program focuses on developing leaders who are transformative, encouraging them to be active contributors in their communities.

Prof. Cotton, who is a citizen of both the UK and of Rwanda, previously provided leadership at the University of Rwanda, first as Principal of the College of Medicine and Health Sciences and then as Vice Chancellor. Prior to this, he practiced in family medicine and was professor of teaching and learning with a responsibility for student welfare at Glasgow University. A graduate of St Andrews and Glasgow universities, he holds honorary professorships at St Andrews, Glasgow and in Rwanda, and is appointed as chair of the Board of Rwanda Biomedical Centre. He is a Methodist preacher, founded a fair-trade organisation in Scotland and is a trustee and advisor to several small charities working in development. In 2017 he was awarded the OBE for services to higher education in Rwanda, and in 2018 he received the Gold Medal from ASME for his outstanding contribution to medical education. He is a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He is convinced of the power of compassion in the transformation of young people throughout the education system.

Margareth Etienne, the Carl L. Vacketta Professor of Law, is the inaugural associate dean for graduate and international programs, where she oversees the College of Law’s JSD, LLM, and MSL programs. Etienne served as the College’s associate dean for academic affairs from 2012-13, the head of the University of Illinois’s Department of African American Studies from 2011-12, and as a provost fellow for the University of Illinois from 2009-11. She has also served on the executive board of the AALS Section on Professional Responsibility from 2006-09.

Professor Etienne teaches criminal law and procedure, sentencing, education law and children in the law. Her research focuses on legal decision-making and ethics in institutions ranging from criminal courts to schools and families. In 2004, she was awarded a Fulbright Grant to conduct judicial training on white-collar crime in Senegal. Her select publications include “Understanding Parity As A First principle of Sentencing” (58 Stanford L. Rev., 2006); “The Ethics of Cause Lawyering: An Empirical Examination of Criminal Defense Lawyers as Cause Lawyers” (95 J. Crim. L. & Criminology, 2005); “The Declining Utility of the Right to Counsel in Federal Court: An Empirical Study on the Role of Defense Attorney Advocacy Under the Sentencing Guidelines” (92 California Law Review, 2004); “Remorse, Responsibility, and Regulating Advocacy: Making Defendants Pay for the Sins of Their Lawyers” (78New York University Law Review, 2003). Her article, “Addressing Gender Based Violence in an International Context,” appeared in 18 Harvard Women’s Law Journal139 (1995). She was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago Law School in 2007-08 and has made presentations at Stanford Law School, the University of Chicago Law School, Northwestern University Law School, Yale Law School, Fordham Law School, University of Oregon Law School, Notre Dame Law School, and the American Bar Foundation.

Professor Etienne received her bachelor’s degree in history with honors from Yale University, and earned her law degree from Yale Law School. Following law school, Etienne clerked for Judge Diana G. Motz on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Before joining the Illinois faculty in 2001, she practiced criminal law in state and federal courts for several years.

Terry Finch is an accomplished executive IT leader for Abbott focused on defining and executing global digital & IT strategies that enable top-line revenue growth through technology enablement. His experience spans global pharmaceuticals, medical devices, diagnostics, and consumer goods segments, having lived and worked in the UK, India, and the US. 

Terry’s in-depth experience spans a wide range of digital transformation areas, specifically in product engineering/development, data & advanced analytics, IoT/Edge/Cloud, and eCommerce solutions that have enabled him to deliver highly successful programs in his 25 years of hands-on experience.

Terry thrives in building and leading high-performing teams that exceed customer expectations and identifying and developing talent, with new organizational capabilities and business models focused on using digitally-enabled technology, product development, and organization enablement.

Linda Herrera (PhD Columbia University, MA American University in Cairo, BA University of California at Berkeley) is a social anthropologist with regional expertise in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Prior to joining the Global Studies in Education program in the College of Education at UIUC in 2011, she was  Senior Lecturer at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam where she was convenor of the Children and Youth Studies specialization. Prior to that, she lived in Egypt for 17 years where she worked in educational research, international development, and social science capacity building. Her books include: Educating Egypt, Global Middle East, Revolution in the Age of Social Media, Wired Citizenship, Being Young and Muslilm, and Cultures of Arab Schooling.

Sarah Janzen is Assistant Professor of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. Dr. Janzen analyzes global poverty dynamics and discovers innovative solutions for sustainable international agricultural development.

A majority of the world’s population living in extreme poverty work in agriculture. Agriculture is a fundamental instrument for sustainable development and poverty reduction. Because agriculture depends directly on climate, climate risk and poverty are deeply intertwined in many rural areas of the developing world. Moreover, agricultural households often have limited access to financial markets, including for insurance. The provision of formal financial services to the rural poor is complicated; the costs are high for both provider and customer, and information constraints, transaction costs and trust can limit both supply and take-up. Dr. Janzen’s research uses economic theory, employs simulation-based methods, and applies rigorous econometric techniques to discover innovative solutions for sustainable international agricultural development.

Dr. Janzen’s research covers three broad areas: risk and resilience, agricultural insurance markets, and rural livelihood programs. Her research demonstrates how insurance mitigates vulnerability by helping smallholder households avoid costly coping strategies and encouraging greater investment. In doing so, insurance can actually reduce poverty rates and cut the costs of social protection. Her applied work has helped develop, pilot and evaluate new financial products for smallholder farmers and pastoralists in Kenya. She has also co-led a team in Nepal evaluating a rural livelihoods program.

Janzen’s research has been published in top applied economics, agricultural economics, and development economics journals. Janzen has been principal or an active co-principal investigator on more than $3 million in competitive research grants. Janzen currently teaches courses on food, poverty, environment and development, as well as impact evaluation. To ensure policy impact, she has written policy briefs and reports, and regularly presents her research to policymakers, donors, non-governmental organizations, and other key stakeholders including the World Bank, the United States Agency for International Development, and the International Food Policy Research Institute. The governments of Kenya and Nepal have both adopted new policies based on Janzen’s research findings.

Janzen earned a B.A. in Economics and International Studies from the University of Nebraska, an M.S. in International and Development Economics from the University of San Francisco and a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California, Davis. Prior to working at the University of Illinois, Janzen was on the faculty at Kansas State University and Montana State University. She has also worked as a consultant for the World Bank.

Fatou Jobe is a 2nd year Ph.D. student in Sociology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She earned her Master’s in African studies at UIUC, where her thesis linked Chinese-Mauritanian fishmeal factories to environmental violence in coastal communities in The Gambia. She was also the instructor of Wolof at UIUC between 2019 and 2022. Her Ph.D. project will use fisheries as a concept to study gender relations within natural resource conflict, Indigenous environmental claims, and the development logic associated with fisheries and aquaculture industrialization projects in The Gambia and potentially Sierra Leone.

Robin Kaler is Associate Chancellor for Public Affairs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A member of the chancellor’s senior leadership team and campus spokesperson, she is responsible for leading the campus’ communications, marketing and branding, issues management, public relations and special events efforts.  She leads the crisis response communications team and is a frequent presenter to professional organizations on crisis communications and media relations.

As director of the Public Affairs office for the Urbana campus, she manages a team of about 50 full-time communications, marketing, media and events staff. The Public Affairs divisions include the News Bureau, Strategic Marketing and Branding, Video Services, Big Ten Video Production, Special Events, Web Services, and executive communications for both the chancellor and provost.

Before joining the university, Ms. Kaler served as the news director at WDWS-WHMS radio in Champaign, Illinois, where she received more than a dozen state and national awards for excellence in broadcast journalism.

John Tofik Karam is director of the Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies and professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is trained in anthropology, the node for the transnational scales of analysis that he develops across Latin American studies and Middle East studies. His first book, Another Arabesque: Syrian-Lebanese Ethnicity in Neoliberal Brazil (Temple University Press) won awards from the Arab American National Museum and the Brazilian Studies Association and has been translated into both Arabic and Portuguese. With María del Mar Logroño Narbona and Paulo G. Pinto, Karam coedited the volume, Crescent over Another Horizon: Islam in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Latino U.S.A. (University of Texas Press). His most recent book is Manifold Destiny: Arabs at an American Crossroads of Exceptional Rule (Vanderbilt University Press), set at the border where Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina meet under U.S. scrutiny. He is currently working on the book project tentatively entitled, “Arab Americana in Spanish and Portuguese: An Open Frontier,” which explores audio, print, and visual texts read as árabe (Arab) in Spanish and Portuguese which are translated to and from English.

Soo Ah Kwon is currently Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and former Department Head. She holds faculty affiliations with the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory and Center for Global Studies.  She is an interdisciplinary scholar, a humanistic social scientist, who works across several fields including Asian American studies, critical ethnic studies, critical youth studies, anthropology, and cultural studies. Her research interests include national and global youth activism, global governance, social change and social movements, and institutionalization of race and diversity in higher education. She is the author of Uncivil Youth: Race, Activism, and Affirmative Governmentality (Duke University Press, 2013) and co-editor of South Korea’s Educational Exodus: The Life and Times of “Early Study Abroad (University of Washington Press, 2015). Her publications appear in American Quarterly, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Journal of Asian American Studies, positions, Journal of Youth Studies, Race, Ethnicity and Education, and Scholar and Feminist. She is currently finishing a ethnography of youth activism inside the United Nations.

Ruby Mendenhall is an Associate Professor in Sociology, African American Studies, Urban and Regional Planning, and Social Work at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.  She is also an affiliate of the Institute for Genomic Biology and the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.  In 2004, Mendenhall received her Ph.D. in Human Development and Social Policy program from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.  For her dissertation, Black Women in Gautreaux’s Housing Desegregation Program: The Role of Neighborhoods and Networks in Economic Independence, she used administrative welfare and employment data, census information, and in-depth interviews to examine the long-run effects of placement neighborhood conditions/resources on economic independence.

Atharva Naik is a Junior from Singapore studying Mathematics & Computer Science. He is a member of the pioneering cohort of the LAS Global Leaders Program, a social innovation program that uses Human-Centered Design to create tangible change. Having lived around Southeast Asia, he brings a unique student perspective as the moderator of the panel on Supporting Youth Development for Global Change.

Dr. David C. Rhew is the Global Chief Medical Officer (CMO) & VP of Healthcare for Microsoft. He is Adjunct Professor at Stanford University; holds six U.S. technology patents that enable authoring, mapping, and integration of clinical decision support into electronic health records; and has been recognized as one of the 50 most influential persons in healthcare by Modern Healthcare.

Dr. Rhew received his Bachelors of Science degrees in computer science and cellular molecular biology from University of Michigan. He received his MD degree from Northwestern University and completed internal medicine residency at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. He completed fellowships in health services research at Cedars-Sinai and infectious diseases at the University of California, Los Angeles.

He has served as CMO and VP for Samsung; SVP and CMO at Zynx Health Incorporated; clinician/researcher at the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System and RAND; and Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine at UCLA. Dr. Rhew has served on the National Quality Forum’s Executive Committee for Consensus Standards and Approval, Chaired the Consumer Technology Association Health Technology Board, and sits on the Governing Committee for NESTcc (National Evaluation System for health Technology coordinating center), the medical device advisory group for the FDA, CMS, and NIH.

Ambassador Reyna Torres Mendivil took office as Consul General of Mexico in Chicago on July 14th, 2019. During her diplomatic career she has held various positions in the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs, including General Director for Latin America and the Caribbean, Deputy General Director for International Policy on Human Rights, and Deputy Chief of Staff to the Secretary of Foreign Relations. She was posted as Deputy Chief of Mission in the Mexican Embassy in the Czech Republic and as political liaison in the Embassy of Mexico in the United States. Before assuming her current position, Ambassador Torres Mendivil served as Consul General in San Antonio, Texas, and before as General Director for Protection of Mexicans Abroad.

Ambassador Torres Mendivil was a resident Fellow at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and participated in the Hemispheric Security Program at the Inter-American Defense College in Washington DC. She graduated from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico (UNAM) and holds a Masters degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics.

William Sullivan works to create healthier, more sustainable communities. He is a Professor of Landscape Architecture and the Director of the Smart, Health Community initiative at the University of Illinois. Sullivan and his colleagues have developed Rokwire, an open-source platform for mobile apps that supports smart, healthy places. The goal of this work is to enhance human capabilities: to create healthier, safer, more equitable, sustainable places; enable better decision-making; and fuel innovation for all members of our community.

Sullivan and his students examine the benefits that come from having regular exposure to urban landscapes containing nature. Sullivan is a Senior Fellow at the National Council for Science and the Environment, and Fellow in the Council of Educator in Landscape Architecture. He holds a PhD from the University of Michigan with a concentration in Environment and Behavior.

Donald J. Wuebbles is an Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Illinois. He is also the Director of the Center for Urban Resilience and Environmental Sustainability (CURES) across the University of Illinois system. From 2015 to early 2017, Dr. Wuebbles was Assistant Director with the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the Executive Office of the President in Washington DC, where he was the White House expert on climate science.  He came the University of Illinois in 1994 and was Head of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois from 1994 to 2006 (prior to this he was a group leader at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory). Dr. Wuebbles also led the development of the School of Earth, Society, and Environment at the University, and was its first director.

Dr. Wuebbles is an expert in atmospheric physics and chemistry, with over 500 scientific publications related to the Earth’s climate, air quality, and the stratospheric ozone layer. However, his work goes well beyond that through providing analyses and development of metrics used in national and international policy and in developing analyses for understanding climate impacts on society and ecosystems, plus potential resilience and societal responses. His metrics for Ozone Depletion Potentials and Global Warming Potentials are commonly used in national and international policy. He has been a leader in many international and national scientific assessments, including being a Coordinating Lead Author on several international climate assessments led by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that resulted in IPCC being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. He co-led the first volume of the 4^th U.S. National Climate Assessment published in November 2017 that assesses the science of climate change and its effects on the United States. He led an assessment on the impacts of climate change on the Great Lakes that was published in March 2019 and co-led a special assessment of the impacts of climate change on the state of Illinois published in May 2021. Dr. Wuebbles has received major awards, including the Cleveland Abbe Award from the American Meteorological Society, the Stratospheric Ozone Protection Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the Bert Bolin Global Environmental Change Award from the American Geophysical Union. He is a Fellow of three major professional science societies, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Meteorological Society. Dr. Wuebbles is currently chairing a special report for the National Academy of Sciences on greenhouse gas emissions information for decision making.

Dr. Wuebbles has two degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois (1970, 1972) and a Ph.D. in Atmospheric Sciences from the University of California, Davis (1983). He and his wife Barbara have been married for 52 years and they have three sons and five grandchildren.

Paul Tiyambe Zeleza currently serves as Associate Provost and North Star Distinguished Professor at Case Western Reserve University, a leading American research university. His immediate past appointment was at the United States International University-Africa in Nairobi, Kenya as Vice Chancellor (President) and Professor of the Social Sciences and Humanities. Prior to that he held distinguished academic and administrative positions in Canada as Professor of History and College Principal at Trent University, Professor of African Studies and History and Center Director at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Professor of History and African and African American Studies and Social Sciences Research Professor at Pennsylvania State University, the Liberal Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor and Department Chair at the University of Illinois at Chicago, President’s Professor and Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Loyola Marymount University, and Academic Vice President at Quinnipiac University. Altogether, he has been at a dozen universities in six countries on three continents and the Caribbean region. He received his bachelor’s degree (with distinction) at the University of Malawi, master’s at the University of London in Britain, and PhD at Dalhousie University in Canada.

In the early 2000s he worked as a consultant for the Ford and MacArthur foundations on their initiatives to revitalize higher education in Africa. His research project on the African academic diaspora conducted for the Carnegie Corporation of New York in 2011-12 led to the establishment of the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program in 2013 that has to date sponsored nearly 500 African born academics in the United States and Canada to work with dozens of universities in six African countries. He has published more than 400 journal articles, book chapters, encyclopedia entries, reviews, short stories, and online essays and authored or edited 27 books and five short monographs. Several of his books have won international awards including the 1994 Noma Award for Publishing in Africa for A Modern Economic History of Africa, Vol I: The Nineteenth Century (1993). His most recent book is Africa and the Disruptions of the 21st Century (2021). He is currently editing a volume of reflections by former vice chancellors of some of Africa’s leading universities titled, The Chronicles of African University Leaders.

An interdisciplinary scholar, his work covers the fields of African economic history, development studies, intellectual history, diaspora studies, gender studies, human rights studies, cultural studies, and literary studies. He has published two collections of short stories and an acclaimed novel. A much sought-after speaker, he has presented nearly 300 keynote addresses, papers, and public lectures at leading universities and international conferences in 32 countries. He has also served on the editorial boards of more than two dozen journals and book series. He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Bibliographies Online in African Studies. He has received numerous awards from major universities for his scholarship. In July 2013, he was recognized in The New York Times as one of 43 Great Immigrants in the United States. In May 2015 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws at Dalhousie University for outstanding personal achievement. In 2015 he was a fellow at Harvard University during which he wrote The Transformation of Global Higher Education, 1945-2015 (2016). Recently, he was awarded the W.E.B. Dubois Fellowship at Harvard to work on a book manuscript titled, The Long Transition to the 21st Century: A Global History of the Present.

He has held the positions of Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town since 2006 and at the Nelson Mandela University since 2019. He has served in more than two dozen international and national associations, most recently as a member of the Administrative Board of the International Association of Universities, the Advisory Board of the Alliance for African Partnership, University of Ghana Council, Chair of the Advisory Council of the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program, and Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Kenya Education Network. In 2008-2009, he served as President of the U.S. African Studies Association. He has raised tens of millions of dollars for institutional advancement and personal research.