John J. Cheslock, PhD

Dr. Cheslock is an associate professor in the higher education program and a senior research associate in the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Penn State. He is also the current director of the graduate certificate program in institutional research. 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 Ph.D. 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

An active affiliate faculty member, Dr. Dooris has been at Penn State since 1981 and has served in several areas, including the University Budget Office and academic affairs. Earlier professional experience included positions as statistician at the U.S. Census Bureau and management consultant at Arthur Andersen & Co. Administratively, Dr. Dooris provides research support to the Office of the Provost for university-level planning, assessment, and continuous quality improvement. His publications have received awards from the Society for College and University Planning and the journal Planning for Higher Education. Dr. Dooris was a CIC Academic Leadership Fellow in 1997-98. He holds a bachelor's degree in economics and a doctorate in higher education from Penn State, and an MBA from the University of Rhode Island.

Robert Reason, PhD

In 2003, following a postdoctoral research fellowship at Iowa State University, Dr. Reason came to Penn State, where he is an assistant professor in the Higher Education Program and the professor-in-charge of the M.Ed. program in college student affairs. Dr. Reason has taught in higher education/student affairs programs at Iowa State University and Western Illinois University. His experience includes courses related to student development in college, counseling for college student affairs professionals, and students in American higher education.

Dr. Reason's research areas include student development in college environments, specifically related to the development of multicultural competence. He has been honored with the Emerging Scholar and Annuit Coeptis awards from the American College Personnel Association.

Dr. Reason earned his doctorate in education at Iowa State University, his master's degree in counseling and student personnel at Mankato State University, and his bachelor's degree in economics at Grinnell College. Prior to his doctoral studies, he gained seven years of student affairs practitioner experience, primarily in residence life.

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.

Daniel Teodorescu, PhD

Dr. Teodorescu is the director of the Office of Institutional Research and Effectiveness at Emory University and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Education Policy Studies at Penn State. Prior to arriving at Emory in 1997, he held positions in institutional research at the College of Charleston and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Dr. Teodorescu completed a Ph.D. in educational administration and policy studies at SUNY Albany.

His primary responsibilities at Emory include supervising the work of institutional research; directing data collection, analysis and dissemination; providing the university's academic and administrative units with relevant information for decision making; and evaluating progress toward the university's strategic plan. His research interests include comparative higher education, multivariate statistics, survey research, knowledge management, and decision information systems.

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.