Saturday, June 20

Carol Geary Schneider

Carol Geary Schneider
President
Association of American Colleges and Universities

Carol Geary Schneider has been president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities since 1998. With a membership of more than 1,150 institutions, including colleges and universities of all types and sizes, AAC&U is the leading national organization devoted to advancing and strengthening undergraduate liberal education.

Since becoming President of AAC&U, Dr. Schneider has initiated several major initiatives. In 2005, AAC&U launched Liberal Education and America's Promise (LEAP), a ten-year public advocacy and campus action initiative designed to engage students and the public with what really matters in a college education for the twenty-first century. The LEAP campaign builds on AAC&U's major effort, Greater Expectations: The Commitment to Quality as a Nation Goes to College, a multi-year initiative designed to articulate the aims of a twenty-first century liberal education and to identify comprehensive, innovative models that improve learning for all undergraduate students.

Under Dr. Schneider's leadership, AAC&U has also expanded its work on diversity, launched several new projects on civic engagement and the disciplines, and deepened its capacity to support campuses working on educational change.

Dr. Schneider is a magna cum laude graduate and was a member of the Board of Trustees of Mount Holyoke College where she received the bachelor's degree in history. She studied at the University of London's Institute for Historical Research and earned the Ph.D. in early modern history from Harvard University.

Rod Miller

Rod Miller

Rod Miller has more than twenty years of leadership and study of institutional advancement in higher education. Appointments have included: senior vice president of University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, vice chancellor of University of Massachusetts Worcester, vice president of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and head of development in higher education institutions. Previously a faculty member in communication, Mr. Miller studies best practices for institutional advancement in higher education institutions. As a member of the core faculty of the Fund Raising School at the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy for many years, he marketed and taught the School's courses in Australia and New Zealand.

Mr. Miller's educational qualifications include a B.A. (Honors) and an M.A. in English from University of Queensland, as well as courses in government and law. He is the founding editor of a communication journal and an author of book chapters and articles on leadership, organizational communication, marketing and fund raising.

Claudia Morner

Claudia Morner
Vice President, JMA Consultants Incorporated; Adjunct Faculty, Simmons College; and Professor, University of New Hampshire

Dr. Morner is the former dean of the university library at UNH. She is a specialist in library space planning. Library Architecture and Space Planning is one of several courses she teaches for Simmons College. She served as a jury member for the 2009 American Institute of Architects/American Library Association biennial Library Building Awards Committee selecting this year's top library designs. She has worked with a wide variety of library types and sizes on planning and design issues.

Sunday, June 21

Stephen J. Reno

Stephen J. Reno
Chancellor
University System of New Hampshire

At the end of June 2009, Stephen Reno will complete nine years of service as chancellor of the University System of New Hampshire. In that role, he supports the work of a 27-member Board of Trustees and the four institutions of USNH. He served formerly as the president of Southern Oregon University, associate provost and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern Maine, and has held teaching and research appointments at the University of Leicester (England), the Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Winchester (England).

He holds doctorate and master's degrees in religious studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the bachelor's degree from St. John's College (California). Dr. Reno is chair of the Board of Trustees of New Hampshire Public Radio and serves on the boards of the Business Industry Association, New Hampshire Public Television, the Salt Center for Documentary Field Studies, and the Assembly of Overseers of the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. Steve and his wife, Kit, live in Manchester. They have two children: Matthew (who is working in Los Angeles) and Katy (who is working in Portsmouth, New Hampshire).

Marilyn Billings

Marilyn Billings
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

NERCOMP presenter of Cyberinfrastructure and the Transformation of Libraries, Marilyn Billings is the Scholarly Communication & Special Initiatives Librarian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She provides campus-wide leadership and education in alternative scholarly communication strategies and is frequently an invited speaker at faculty department colloquia. She gives presentations on author rights, alternative digital publishing models and the role of digital repositories in today's research and scholarship endeavors. One aspect of her responsibilities is the oversight of the digital repository ScholarWorks @ UMass Amherst. She also organizes programs on new and emerging topics for librarians, faculty, and researchers.