Chun-Mei Zhao

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Chun-Mei Zhao is currently the Director of Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) International Consortium and a Research Associate at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley. In this capacity, she leads the effort to generate new knowledge, facilitate international dialogues, and share best practices to improve undergraduate learning in the research university context. She works closely with higher education leaders and scholars spanning four continents (Asia, Europe, Africa, and South America) and ensures the smooth operation of a collaborative platform that allows a research university to position itself globally, while gaining practical knowledge to act locally.

Prior to joining the Center at Berkeley, she was a Senior Scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, based in Stanford, California. At Carnegie, her chief responsibility included directing the Carnegie Classifications of Institutions of Higher Education, the most widely recognized typology of colleges and universities around the world. She supervised and implemented the comprehensive update of the 2010 Carnegie Classifications. She also served as a co-director of the Carnegie Professors of the Year national selection program as well as a co-director of a higher education exchange initiative funded by the European Union.

She has been active as a consultant/expert in a number of organizations and took part in quality definition and assurance projects with the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (a US regional accreditation body) and Lumina Foundation. In her earlier career, she was one of the four principal research analysts at the National Survey of Student Engagement, based at Indiana University, Bloomington.

She has extensive experience in higher education on a wide range of subjects, including research and policy issues related to student experience, quality assurance and learning outcome assessment, institution differentiation and strategy, institutional research, and international higher education. Her writing has been published in a number of academic journals such as Review of Higher Education, Research in Higher Education, the Journal of Higher Education, Change Magazine, and several international journals.  Selected publications include “The learning outcomes race: the value of self-reported gains in large research universities” (with John Douglass and Gregg Thomson), Higher Education, 2012, in press;  “What do higher education and wine industries have in common and what does classification have to do with it?" (in Chinese), Evaluation Bimonthly, 2008, pp. 42-44; “More than a signature: How advisor choice and advisor behavior affect doctoral student satisfaction” (with Chris Golde and Alexander McCormick), 2007, Journal of Further and Higher Education, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 263-281; and “Rethinking and Reframing the Carnegie Classification” (with Alexander McCormick), Change Magazine, 2005, vol. 37, no. 5, pp. 50-57.

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