John J. Cheslock, PhD

Dr. Cheslock is an associate professor in the higher education program and director of the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Penn State. Dr. Cheslock served as director of the graduate certificate program in institutional research from 2010 to 2012. Dr. Cheslock's research focuses on the economics of higher education with a special interest in enrollment management, faculty labor markets, intercollegiate athletics, and the use of quantitative methods within educational research.

His current research projects examine the changing structure of institutional financial aid, the growing stratification in faculty salaries, the impact of Title IX on intercollegiate athletics, and the use of multilevel models in educational research. Dr. Cheslock obtained his doctorate in labor economics from Cornell University. From 2001 to 2009, he served on the faculty of the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona.

Michael J. Dooris, PhD

Dr. Dooris is executive director of the Office of Planning and Institutional Assessment, reporting to the Executive Vice President and Provost. He is also an active affiliate associate professor in the College of Education’s higher education graduate program. Dr. Dooris has been at Penn State since 1981 in a variety of positions, including in the University budget office and in undergraduate education. Early in his career he worked as a statistician at the U.S. Census Bureau and in industry. He has consulted on strategic planning and institutional research in Europe, Africa, South America, and the United States. He was a CIC Academic Leadership Fellow in 1997-98. In 2010 he completed a Fulbright fellowship in Brazil. His publications include the chapter on planning and resource management in The Handbook of Institutional Research (Association for Institutional Research and Jossey-Bass, 2012). Dr. Dooris holds a bachelor of science in economics and a doctorate in higher education from Penn State, and an MBA from the University of Rhode Island.

Frederick D. Loomis, PhD

Dr. Frederick D. Loomis serves as associate professor and coordinator of the institutional research certificate program. He received his PhD in higher education from Penn State and has more than 35 years of leadership and policy experience in higher education and in the public sector, with special expertise in online learning, strategic planning, institutional assessment, and diversity. Dr. Loomis has teaching and administrative experience at 4 universities and has held the positions of director of planning, dean, special assistant to the provost, executive director, and academic program director. Early in his career, Dr. Loomis served as a senior civil rights specialist with the U.S. Department of Education. Dr. Loomis has consulted with state and local governments, school districts, career and technical centers, and higher education institutions in the United States, Egypt, and Tanzania.

Linda C. Strauss, PhD

Dr. Strauss has more than ten years of experience as an administrator and researcher in higher education. She has served as director of Penn State's Equal Opportunity Program and the summer Learning Edge Academic Program (LEAP). In 1998 she was selected to serve for a year as an Administrative Fellow to work with Penn State's senior vice president for finance and business/treasurer. Dr. Strauss has published on a wide array of topics, ranging from the impact of institutional and student characteristics on student outcomes to racial identity development. She has co-authored several book chapters and has published in Research in Higher Education and The Journal of Higher Education.

Her current research interests include athletic administration, institutional research, racial identity development, and engineering accreditation. Most recently, Dr. Strauss served as an institutional research consultant to the Office of Undergraduate Education at Penn State, and she teaches a course on research and assessment in student affairs for the graduate program in higher education.

Patrick T. Terenzini, PhD

Dr. Terenzini is Distinguished Professor of Education and senior scientist in the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Penn State. He is co-author (with Ernest T. Pascarella) of How College Affects Students (Jossey-Bass, 1991), an award-winning synthesis of twenty years of research on the impacts of the college experience on students, recently selected as "one of the 100 most important and influential books about U.S. colleges and universities published in the 20th century." The second volume of this review was published in early 2005.

Dr. Terenzini's research examines the effects of college on student learning and development; persistence and educational attainment; and the college experience and outcomes for low-income and first-generation students. He has received awards from numerous organizations including the Association for the Study of Higher Education and the Association for Institutional Research. Dr. Terenzini holds a bachelor's degree in English from Dartmouth College, a master's degree in English education from Harvard University, and a doctorate in higher education from Syracuse University. Before coming to Penn State, he held administrative and/or teaching positions at Dean College (Massachusetts), Syracuse University, SUNY Albany, and the University of Georgia.

J. Fredericks Volkwein, PhD

Dr. Volkwein has had a forty-year career as a researcher, administrator, and faculty member. After receiving a bachelor's degree from Pomona College and a doctorate from Cornell University, he held a variety of administrative posts, first at SUNY Binghamton and then for thirty years at SUNY Albany, where he was director of institutional research and a faculty member in the Department of Educational Administration and Policy Studies. At Penn State he is a professor emeritus in the Department of Education Policy Studies and senior scientist emeritus in the Center for the Study of Higher Education. Dr. Volkwein is also the founding director of the graduate certificate program in Institutional Research.

His teaching and research interests span the areas of academic program evaluation and accreditation, assessment of student learning and growth, state regulation and performance indicators, campus culture and climate, and administrative satisfaction and decision support. All his scholarly work is related, directly or indirectly, to the topic of organizational effectiveness. He is currently the principal investigator or co-principal investigator on projects in the areas of accreditation, engineering education, and training of institutional researchers.

Dr. Volkwein has produced more than 100 journal articles, research reports, conference papers, and book chapters. He also serves as editor-in-chief for the Jossey-Bass series New Directions for Institutional Research and is a consulting editor for three other higher education journals. A recent winner of the Association for Institutional Research's AIR Suslow Award for distinguished scholarship, he has served as president of the North East Association for Institutional Research and received its Distinguished Service Award. Dr. Volkwein chaired the Middle States committee that produced the monograph Framework for Outcomes Assessment.