Adrianna Kezar is director of the Pullias Center of Higher Education, Dean’s Professor of Leadership and Wilbur-Kieffer Professor of Higher Education at the University of Southern California. An expert on change leadership, diversity, equity and inclusion, faculty, STEM reform, collaboration and governance in higher education, Kezar is well published with 26 books and monographs, more than 100 journal articles and over 100 book chapters and reports. She has acquired over $22 million dollars in grant funding and has worked on grant-funded projects exceeding $35 million dollars on a variety of projects to fundamentally improve higher education. At the Pullias Center, Kezar directs the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success, The Change Leadership Toolkit for Advancing Systemic Change in Higher Education, Building a Culture of Shared Equity Leadership in Higher Education and the Faculty, Academic Careers & Environments (FACE) projects. She consults with government agencies, accreditation bodies, foundations, state systems, consortiums and individual campuses.

R. Todd Benson is executive director of the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE) at Harvard University. Benson served as a student affairs administrator for over 10 years before pursuing a doctorate in higher education leadership and policy. Making the leap from student affairs to academic affairs began with work in service-learning and civic engagement at East Stroudsburg University, where he collaborated with faculty and staff on a host of classroom based and co-curricular projects. Benson earned his doctorate at Vanderbilt University, where he studied the experiences of doctoral students and the factors that contributed to their acculturation into their respective disciplines. This work expanded as he assumed roles in both the Office of the Associate Dean of Graduate Education for Peabody College of Education and Human Development and the Vanderbilt Institutional Research Group. Benson is currently responsible for the overall administration of the COACHE Survey as well data analysis and reporting.

Aditi Pai is special assistant to the Office of the Provost, professor of biology and co-director of the Teaching Resource and Research Center at Spelman College. At Spelman, Pai has taught the introductory biology course on ecology, evolution and biodiversity, evolutionary biology electives, a research methods course, and the capstone course in biology. Her lab studies sexual selection using the red flour beetle as a model system. She’s been a member of the Steering Committee for the National Science Foundation-funded Research Coordination Networks in Undergraduate Biology Education Science Case Network, which brings together educators, developers and researchers to find, use and study case-based and problem-based pedagogies.

Colleen Flaherty, Senior Editor of Special Content, previously served as Student Voice Editor for Inside Higher Ed. Prior to joining the publication in 2012, Colleen was military editor at the Killeen Daily Herald, outside Fort Hood, Texas. Before that, she covered government and land use issues for the Greenwich Time and Hersam Acorn Newspapers in her home state of Connecticut. After graduating from McGill University in Montreal with a degree in English literature, Colleen taught English and English as a second language in public schools in the Bronx, New York. She earned her M.S.Ed. from City University of New York Lehman College as part of the New York City Teaching Fellows program.

Doug Lederman helps lead the news organization's editorial operations, overseeing news content, opinion pieces, career advice, blogs and other features. Doug speaks widely about higher education, including on C-Span and National Public Radio and at meetings and on campuses around the country, and his work has appeared in The New York Times and USA Today, among other publications. Doug was managing editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education from 1999 to 2003. Before that, Doug had worked at The Chronicle since 1986 in a variety of roles, first as an athletics reporter and editor. He has won three National Awards for Education Reporting from the Education Writers Association, including one in 2009 for a series of Inside Higher Ed articles he co-wrote on college rankings. He began his career as a news clerk at The New York Times. He grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and graduated in 1984 from Princeton University.

Dr. Erin Furtak is a professor of STEM Education in the School of Education at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she has been a faculty member since 2008. She studies how to broaden student participation in science learning by designing better classroom assessments that center students' interests and experiences with teachers, students and families. In previous phases of her career, she has served as Associate Dean of Faculty, Director of STEM Teacher Education, and Program Area Chair. Dr. Furtak is a Certified Workshop Facilitator for NCFDD and a coach in the NCFDD's Faculty Success Program.