The Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) is delighted to announce that Dr. Igor Chirikov has been appointed as the Center’s Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Consortium Director and Senior Researcher. His first day at UC Berkeley will be December 10, 2018.
The SERU Consortium is an international group of leading research-intensive universities, policy researchers, and scholars founded and based at Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, working in close partnership with the University of Minnesota, the International Graduate Insight Group Ltd (i-graduate), the Higher School of Economics (HSE), Moscow, and member universities. The Consortium currently includes some 24 major American research universities (including all of the UC campuses and the majority of public AAU institutions) and 20 top-tier international universities.
As the new SERU Consortium Director, Dr. Chirikov will be responsible for overall SERU Consortium coordination and development, working in close partnership with the University of Minnesota’s SERU North American team and member universities. This will include exploring new approaches to the use of data to assess the student experience and managing SERU’s undergraduate (ugSERU) and graduate student (gradSERU) surveys administration internationally; Minnesota will remain the administrator of SERU Surveys and the liaison with member universities in the US and Canada. Dr. Chirikov will also pursue policy and scholarly research that supports SERU’s and CSHE’s evolving research agenda.
The SERU Consortium Director is a new position at CSHE and Dr. Chirikov will work with SERU Founding Principal Investigator and Senior Research Fellow John Aubrey Douglass to expand the membership and research output of the SERU project. “We are very excited to have Igor join CSHE as a full-time researcher,” states Douglass. “His appointment will significantly bolster the management capacity and research productivity of the SERU Consortium and the Center. He is a creative thinker and proven scholar!”
Igor Chirikov previously worked as a Senior Research Fellow and a Vice-Rector at HSE University Moscow in Russia. Throughout his career, he has successfully balanced research, teaching, and senior leadership roles at HSE University – the most selective and internationalized western-style university in Russia. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in Sociology from HSE University Moscow and M.A. in Sociology from the University of Manchester and the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences.
His research involves student experience and learning outcomes, international comparative higher education (focusing on Russia and China), and organizational change in higher education. His papers were published in Studies in Higher Education, Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, Higher Education Research and Development, Post-Soviet Affairs, and other journals. He has experience in coordinating large-scale international projects in higher education, and he currently serves as SERU-International Managing Director at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley. He was the Founding Director of Russia’s first institutional research office, and then became the Vice-Rector of HSE University Moscow, where he supervised student development, institutional research, teaching and learning, and alumni relations.
Henry Brady, Interim Director of CSHE, adds “Dr. Chirikov will strengthen our international outreach and presence and ensure the future of SERU.”