President Ann E. Cudd joined Portland State in August, 2023, bringing with her an immense amount of energy and focus on the mission and values of Oregon’s urban research university. She comes to the president’s office as an accomplished academic leader and philosophy scholar whose research explores themes of oppression, economic inequality, capitalism and gender. She is the author of more than 60 books, articles, and chapters spanning topics from social and political philosophy, philosophy of economics, decision theory and feminist theory.

Cudd came to Portland from western Pennsylvania where she served as Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor of the 34,000-student, five-campus University of Pittsburgh from 2018 to 2023. During her tenure at Pitt, applications increased by 60% and Cudd was instrumental in the university offering enhanced financial aid through the Pitt Success Pell Match, similar to PSU’s Tuition-Free Degree Program. She is a proven champion of racial justice and equity initiatives, including the development of an online course for incoming students on racism in America. 

Prior to Pitt, Cudd served at another urban university as Boston University’s Dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, that school’s largest college. In that role, she oversaw all strategic decisions related to the college’s academic, financial, and administrative direction and growth. While in Boston, she developed an experiential learning program, Metrobridge, which takes on real world projects from the community into classes.

Prior to joining Boston University in 2015, Cudd served for 25 years at the University of Kansas, where she earned the title of University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy. She held various positions of increasing responsibility — from Director of Graduate Studies and Director of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies to Associate Dean for Humanities in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences to Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Studies.

Cudd holds three advanced degrees from the University of Pittsburgh, including a doctorate of philosophy and master’s degrees in philosophy and economics. She also holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and philosophy from Swarthmore College. She has held faculty positions at the University of Kansas, Occidental College, Boston University and the University of Pittsburgh. 

Robert Asselin is a policy expert on innovation policy, productivity, and industrial competitiveness, with senior experience across government, business, and academia. He is a Senior Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and contributes regularly to national discussions on Canada’s economic future.

He previously served as Senior Vice President, Policy at the Business Council of Canada, where he led work on economic and fiscal policy. In government, he was Policy and Budget Director to the Minister of Finance and a senior advisor to two Prime Ministers, roles that placed him at the center of federal decision-making on economic and fiscal matters.

In academia, Robert was Associate Director of the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and a Visiting Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. He also serves on the Canadian Advisory Board of the U.S. Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), one of the world’s leading think tanks on innovation policy.

Bryan J. Cook is a nationally recognized higher education policy leader with more than two decades of experience at the intersection of research, data, and public policy. He currently serves as Director of Higher Education Policy in the Urban Institute’s Division on Work, Education, and Labor where he leads a team of researchers advancing analysis and tools to inform federal and state policy debates. Since joining Urban in 2021, Dr. Cook has overseen a substantial portfolio of funded projects, organized a national convening on the Supreme Court’s ruling on race in college admissions, and authored widely cited reports on admissions, accountability, and equity in higher education.

Prior to Urban, Dr. Cook held senior leadership roles at the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, the American Dental Education Association, and the American Council on Education. His career has been defined by building data infrastructure, shaping policy positions, and translating complex research into actionable insights for policymakers, institutions, and the public.

Dr. Cook earned his doctorate and master’s degrees in higher education from the University of Michigan and a bachelor’s degree in urban and regional planning from Miami University.

Robert B. Gibbs recently completed a 10-year term as Inaugural Director of the Jackman Humanities Institute. He is a Professor of Philosophy and of Religion.

His current research focuses on Higher Education, and he has recently completed a book length manuscript, The University in Question: Ideas in Dialogue. In it he inquires what a Research University is for and explores different models of universities by refocusing on the research capacities of students.

His previous research is located on the borderlines of philosophy and religion, with a comparative and historical focus on law and ethics. He has worked on ethics in relation to the modern Jewish philosophical tradition and has numerous publications in this and in related fields in continental philosophy.

Katherine S. Newman became the Provost and Executive Vice President of Academic Affairs of the University of California in January of 2023.  She was simultaneously appointed as the Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at UC Berkeley.

Newman was previously the University of Massachusetts System Chancellor for Academic Programs, the Senior Vice President for Economic Development and the Torrey Little Professor of Sociology at UMass Amherst, and prior to that, the James B. Knapp Dean of the Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University.

Newman is the author of fifteen books on topics ranging from technical education and apprenticeship, to the sociological study of the working poor in America’s urban centers, middle class economic insecurity under the brunt of recession, and school violence on a mass scale.  She has written extensively on the consequences of globalization for youth in Western Europe, Japan, South Africa and the US, on the impact of regressive taxation on the poor, and on the history of American political opinion on the role of government intervention.   

Dr. Newman has served as the Forbes Class of 1941 Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs and Director of the Institute for International and Regional Studies at Princeton, the founding Dean of Social Science at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study and the director of Harvard’s Multidisciplinary Program on Inequality and Social Policy, where she served as the Malcolm Weiner Professor of Urban Studies in the Kennedy School of Government.  She taught for 16 years in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University and for two years in the School of Law at the University of California Berkeley.  

Her forthcoming book, coauthored with Dr. Elisabeth Jacobs, a senior fellow in the Center on Labor, Human Services and Population at the Urban Institute, is entitled Moving the Needle: What Tight Labor Markets Do for the Poor, will be published in the Spring of 2023.  Newman’s 2019 book, Downhill From Here: Retirement Insecurity in the Age of Inequality analyzes the impact of pension collapse, two tiered labor contracts, municipal bankruptcy, and the emergence of the “grey labor force” on the nation’s retirees. 

Lynn Pasquerella was appointed president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities in 2016, after serving as the eighteenth president of Mount Holyoke College. She has held positions as Provost at the University of Hartford and Vice Provost for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Rhode Island, where she taught for more than two decades. A philosopher whose work has combined teaching and scholarship with local and global engagement, Pasquerella has written extensively on medical ethics, metaphysics, public policy, and the philosophy of law. Her most recent book, What We Value: Public Health, Social Justice, and Educating for Democracy, examines the role of higher education in addressing some of the most pressing contemporary issues at the intersection of ethics, law, and public policy. Pasquerella is immediate past president of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and the host of Northeast Public Radio’s The Academic Minute.

She is a graduate of Quinebaug Valley Community College, Mount Holyoke College, and Brown University. Her awards and honors include receiving the President’s Award and Judith Krug Medal from Phi Beta Kappa; the William Rogers Award and the Horace Mann Medal from Brown University; the STAR Scholars Network North Star Lifetime Achievement Award; Mary Baldwin University’s Algernon Sydney Sullivan Service to Humanity Award; the Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences Advocacy Award; Quinebaug Valley Community College Champions Award; and the Mount Holyoke Alumni Association’s Elizabeth Topham Kennan Award. Pasquerella holds honorary degrees from Elizabethtown College, Bishop’s University, the University of South Florida, the University of Hartford, the University of Rhode Island, Concordia College, Mount Holyoke College, Bay Path University, and St. Mary’s College and was named by Diverse: Issues in Higher Education as one of America’s top 35 women leaders. She serves on the boards of the Lingnan Foundation, the National Trust for the Humanities, the Coalition for the Common Good, and Handshake.