Jewell Winn, Ed.D. is the executive director for International Programs and the deputy chief Diversity Officer at Tennessee State University. She has 35 years in higher education administration and has had a variety of experiences since graduating from MTSU in 1981. She also has a Master’s in Public Administration, apart from her Doctorate of Education, which she finished in 2008.
In 2013-14 she served as the president of the organization, Women in Higher Education in Tennessee (WHET), which represents a board consortium of private and public universities across the state.
Glenda Glover, Ph.D., J.D. has been the president of Tennessee State University since 2013. Formerly she was the dean of the college of business at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi. She is a certified public account and JD credentialed attorney, apart from her administrative post as president at TSU. She has also served on corporate boards with entities like Citigroup-Student Loan Corporation, Pinnacle Financial Partners, and First Guaranty Bancshares.
She began in the academic sphere by taking on a mathematics major at TSU, making the institution her alma mater, but since then she has attained an MBA from Clark Atlanta University, a PhD in Business from George Washington University, and her JD from Georgetown University. She is considered a foremost expert in the country on corporate and legal frameworks for organizational and institutional development, and has produced more than one hundred papers on such areas of research.
Flora Tydings, Ph.D. was appointed Chancellor by the Tennessee Board of Regents in a unanimous vote on Dec. 27, 2016, effective Feb. 1, 2017. As Chancellor, she is chief executive officer of the Board of Regents system, managing operations of the system office and providing strategic leadership for the system’s institutions in accordance with the Board’s policies and direction and with Tennessee law. She arrived as the Board and its institutions continue the transition into a more unified community and technical college system under the FOCUS (Focus on College and University Success) Act of 2016. The TBR system is also the primary driver in Tennessee’s Drive to 55 initiative.
Dr. Tydings earned her Doctor of Education degree in Occupational Studies at The University of Georgia; her Master of Education degree at Mercer University, and her Bachelor of Science degree in education, with an emphasis in behavioral science, at Georgia Southern University.
Joe Dipietro, Ph.D. became the 25th President of the University of Tennessee schools system in 2011. DiPietro is the chief executive officer of a statewide university system that includes the flagship campus in Knoxville, campuses in Chattanooga and Martin, the Health Science Center in Memphis, the Space Institute in Tullahoma, and statewide institutes of agriculture and public service.
Before coming to UT, DiPietro served as dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Florida from 1997 to 2006. Prior to that, he rose to tenured professor of veterinary clinical medicine and veterinary pathobiology at the University of Illinois, Urbana, and held administrative positions there including assistant director of the Agriculture Experiment Station and associate dean for research of the College of Veterinary Medicine. Prior to becoming president, DiPietro served as chancellor of the UT Institute of Agriculture from 2006 to 2010.
Rep. Harry Brooks is the 19th district of Tennessee’s representative and he serves on the House Education Administration & Planning Committee as Chair in in the Tennessee General Assembly. The 19th district is located in Knox county near Knoxville, TN, and he has been the incumbent representative since 2002. He also has experience as a politician working on the State & Local Government Committee, the Finance Ways & Means Committee, and the Select Committee on Children and Youth. He has been chair of the House Education committee since 2009.
Pat Ryan is the volunteer President and founder of the Tennessee World Affairs Council. In 2007 Mr. Ryan organized a group of concerned citizens to launch Tennessee’s first World Affairs Council, to bring global awareness education programs and resources to communities and schools in the state. In 2009 Mr. Ryan’s contribution to building international understanding was acknowledged by receipt of the “Mandala Award” at the Window on the World Festival of Tennessee Technological University. The Council, responding to the statewide interest in its programs, has moved from its first home in Cookeville to Nashville where it is hosted on the campus of Belmont University.
Maritza González, Ph.D. is the executive officer of equity and diversity at Metro Nashville Public Schools. She works on creating greater equity and access for academic programs and services. She will serve as a guiding force for decisions across the district, ensuring they are made with the needs of all students in mind. She moved to the United States from El Salvador when she was six years old and holds a variety of degrees in international business, communication, education and policy. She is an expert in family and community partnerships and has experience in curriculum design for diverse learners.
Marcela Wolff Lopez has worked at EAFIT since July, 2009. She represents EAFIT in Colombia Challenge Your Knowledge – CCYK, a national initiative led by accredited universities in Colombia and supported by several government and private entities, with the objective of promoting Colombia worldwide as an academic destination, where she was a member of the Steering Committee from 2011 until 2013. She was previously responsible of EAFIT’s international projects in the Continuing Education Center (2008-2009) and she was a part-time lecturer on International Aid in the School of Business (2005-2009). She received her MBA degree from Universidad EAFIT in 2008, her Graduate Certificate in International Business from the same university in 2003, and her Architecture Bachelor’s degree from Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in 1999. She is a DAAD DIES alumnus as she participated in the University Leadership and Management Training Program (UNILEAD 2010-2011). Her areas of expertise are international project management, intercultural communication, international education management, south-south cooperation practices and development of global partnerships.
Avery Dickins de Girón, Ph.D. is the Executive Director of the Center for Latin American Studies, Lecturer in Anthropology (Ph.D., Vanderbilt University). Avery earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Vanderbilt in 2008. Her research examines international development programs in Q’eqchi’ Maya villages as well as the security guard industry in Guatemala. She teaches VISAGE Guatemala, and her duties at CLAS include grant writing, reporting, budget oversight and faculty relations.
She currently chairs the Language Committee for the Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs (CLASP), which supports the teaching and learning of indigenous Latin American languages and Portuguese at U.S. universities. She also serves as the Treasurer of the Guatemala Scholars Network, and is the faculty adviser for the Inter-American Health Alliance student chapter at Vanderbilt.
Ted Fisc
her, Ph.D. is the Director for the Center of Latin American Studies and Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. His ethnography has taken him from Guatemala to Germany, and he has written numerous books on the realities of politics, identity, and localities in larger globalized discourses surrounding well-being and health including Broccoli and Desire (2006) and The Good Life: Aspiration, Dignity, and the Anthropology of Wellbeing (2014).
He is the founder of Mani+ which is a “ready to use food supplement” (RUSF) meant to bolster diets among malnourished children in mostly rural, mostly indigenous parts of Guatemala (where the malnutrition rate is one of the highest in the world). This project is modeled off social enterprise models and its inputs like labor or ingredients are sourced in Guatemala, helping to end the product’s dependency on foreign manufacture or resources.
Mauricio Alviar-Ramírez, Ph.D. studied economics as an undergraduate at the Universidad de Antioquia in Medellin, Colombia, then studied in the United States to obtain his Master’s of Development Policy (at Duke) and his Doctorate of Agricultural Economics and Natural Resources (at Oklahoma State University). Now he is the rector of the Universidad de Antioquia.
From 2004-2009, he was a member of the National Commission for the Assurance of Quality in Higher Education and the Board of Masters and Doctoral Programs of the Colombian Ministry of Education. He has been a visiting professor at Universidad de los Andes, researcher in Fedesarrollo, and a summer intern at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington D.C. He has also acted as an evaluator in the doctoral fellowships of Banco de la República and Colfuturo.
Paula Covington is Latin American and Iberian Bibliographer at the Vanderbilt University Libraries and a Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies. She has taught Latin American Research Methods for more than three decades, and is the author of an award-winning work, Latin America and the Caribbean: A Research Guide, a research project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Paula is past president of the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM), an international organization focused on the development of research services and library collections of Latin Americana. She has twice received the José Toribio Medina award for a distinguished monograph in Latin American Studies. Paula received her degrees from Syracuse University and Vanderbilt University in Latin American history and studied at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. She is a participant in an NEH-funded project to preserve and digitize colonial Latin American slave society records (Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies). Her principal research interest is 19th-century women travelers to Latin America.
Mimi Barnard, Ph.D. is the Associate Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies and Global Education. In this role, she leads Belmont’s interdisciplinary and adult degree programs, study abroad, and international student and scholar services, which includes strategic partnerships with higher education institutions abroad.
In collaboration with ISGE staff and faculty, Barnard facilitates opportunities for international education, including short-term, faculty-led initiatives, semesters abroad, and exchange of students and faculty. Additionally, ISGE serves as the academic “incubator” for the university, where new programs, such as Social Entrepreneurship and Motion Pictures, are developed before moving to permanent homes across the institution.
Ted Townsend serves as Chief Operating Officer for the Department of Economic and Community Development where he oversees the department’s day-to-day affairs.
Prior to his becoming Chief Operating Officer, Mr. Townsend was Assistant Commissioner of Strategy where he oversaw all rural programs including Select Tennessee, ThreeStar, Tennessee Main Street, Tennessee Downtowns and Retire Tennessee, along with federal grant programs that include Community Development Block Grants, the Delta Regional Authority and the Appalachian Regional Commission. Mr. Townsend has also served the department as TNECD Regional Director over the Greater Memphis Region comprised of Fayette, Lauderdale, Shelby and Tipton Counties.
Jeff Overby, Ph.D. currently serves as Director of the Center for International Business and Associate Professor of Marketing at Belmont University. His responsibilities include teaching marketing and international business at the undergraduate and graduate levels, expanding Belmont’s International Business major, establishing study abroad relationships with foreign universities, and promoting internationalization within the Jack C. Massey College of Business and the greater Nashville community. He also regularly teaches in international study programs, including recent study abroad trips to Spain, France, United Arab Emirates, South Korea, South Africa and Botswana.
Jose D. Gonzalez, is an Instructor of Management and Entrepreneurship at the Jack C. Massey College of Business. After several years as an adjunct professor, he joined the faculty in 2007. Mr. González teaches courses in International Business, Financial Management and Entrepreneurship. Also, he is co-founder of the local non-profit Conexión Américas, which works with the local Latino population in a variety of ways.
He is particularly interested in Social Entrepreneurship and the links between Economic Development and Entrepreneurship. He is passionate about promoting Study Abroad initiatives and one of his favorite activities as a college professor is to lead international academic trips. For example, he has been involved in a couple of international economic development entrepreneurship projects working with fair trade coffee farmers in Guatemala.
Robert C. (Bob) Fisher, Ph.D. is President of Belmont University. Prior to his appointment at Belmont in April of 2000, he was vice president for academic affairs at Arkansas State University and had previously served as dean of the school of business at Henderson State University.
He has served the community of Nashville in various roles including chair of the Greater Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce, chair of the board of the Pencil Foundation, co-chair of the Mayor’s Task Force on Public Education and as a member of the board for non-profits such as the Nashville Public Education Foundation, Alignment Nashville, Cumberland Region Tomorrow, United Way, Nashville Symphony, Country Music Hall of Fame, and others.
Fisher earned his BSBA from Henderson State University, an MBA from the University of Memphis, and a PhD from the University of Arkansas.
Alisa White, Ph.D. is the tenth president of Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tenn. She previously served as provost and senior vice president for Academic Affairs at the University of Texas at Tyler, where she oversaw approximately 7,500 students, 450 full-time faculty members and a $45 million operating budget. During her time at UT Tyler, White secured $4 million from The University of Texas System to establish the Patriots Applying Technology for Success and Savings (PATSS) program.
White graduated in 1980 with her B.A. in business from Lee College (now Lee University), in Cleveland, Tenn. In 1984, she received her Master of Science in library and information science from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She earned her Doctor of Philosophy in mass communication degree from UT Knoxville in 1990.
María Victoria Mejía is the director of the Instituto Tecnológico Metropolitano (ITM) in Colombia. She is the incumbent director from 2015-2019 for the institution, and a lawyer and specialist in administration and management. She has worked on accreditation and teaches administration at the Universidad de Medellin.
Jorge Osorio, M.D. is the director of the Universidad CES from 2016 to the beginning of 2019. He’s a medical graduate of Universidad CES and has a M.P.H. from the Universidad de Chile and a Master’s in University Administration from the Universidad de los Andes. Since 2000 he has served as Dean of Medicine of the Institution. He has participated in multiple meetings and committees of the health sector at local and national level and is currently President of the ASCOFAME Association of Medical Schools.