Academic Staff

Josefina Castillo Baltodano

Founder and Executive Director, Executive Leadership Academy

Josefina Baltodano is currently serving at UC Berkeley as Senior Associate – External Relations of the Center for Studies in Higher Education and Founding Executive Director of the Executive Leadership Academy (ELA). ELA is a multi-day program designed to provide insights and experiences that will be useful to persons who are interested in moving to high-level university and college leadership positions, such as provosts, presidents, and chancellors. The ELA Alumni Network is made up of 321 individuals who come from 35 states and 10 countries. Baltodano was highlighted in Diverse...

George Blumenthal

Director, Center for Studies in Higher Education

George R. Blumenthal is formerly UC Santa Cruz's 10th chancellor. He joined the campus in 1972 as a faculty member in astronomy and astrophysics and was named chancellor on September 19, 2007, after serving as acting chancellor for 14 months.

The Blumenthal era has been marked by a commitment to ensuring that the doors of opportunity at UC Santa Cruz are open to all:

The number of undergraduate students from underrepresented minorities has increased by 50 percent since Blumenthal took office.
Nearly half of the entering class in 2016 received Pell Grants, the federal...

Igor Chirikov

Senior Researcher and SERU Consortium Director

Igor Chirikov is the Director of the Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Consortium and Senior Researcher at CSHE. SERU Consortium is an academic and policy research collaboration based at Center for Studies in Higher Education at the UC Berkeley working in partnership with the University of Minnesota, the International Graduate Insight Group (i-graduate) and member universities. The Consortium is a group of leading research-intensive universities that increase student success by generating and analyzing comparative data on the student experience.

As SERU Consortium...

John Aubrey Douglass

Senior Research Fellow

John Aubrey Douglass is Senior Research Fellow and Research Professor - Public Policy and Higher Education at the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) at the University of California - Berkeley. He is the author of Neo-Nationalism and Universities (Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press 2021), ...

Anne MacLachlan

Senior Research Associate and Visiting Scholars Coordinator

Anne J. MacLachlan is a retired senior researcher at CSHE who continues to be devoted to increasing access, persistence, and success in postsecondary education for underrepresented groups (URM) including domestic minorities, women, and those from uneducated/poor families with an emphasis on those in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Her research areas cover the spectrum of postsecondary populations including community college and transfer students, undergraduates in general, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty. Among these, doctoral...