In her current role at Muhlenberg, Rebekkah oversees the entire advancement operation, including alumni affairs; annual giving; leadership gifts; corporate and foundation relations; planned giving; advancement services; donor relations, advancement communications; special projects; and the career center. She manages a team of 47 professionals, and serves as a member of the President’s Senior Staff, responsible for advising and working with the president on the full spectrum of institutional issues. A native of Hamburg, PA, Rebekkah was a theatre major with a concentration in dance at Muhlenberg College. She received her MBA from St. John’s University. Following graduation from Muhlenberg, she worked in public affairs at Saks Fifth Avenue and in corporate relations and marketing at St. John’s University. After serving as Director of Corporate Development and Donor Relations at the Entertainment Industry Foundation, Rebekkah was named Director of Corporate and Foundation Relations at the Columbia Business School of Columbia University. In September 2008, she was promoted to Executive Director of Development and in July 2011 accepted her current position at Muhlenberg College.
Lynsey joined UC San Diego’s University Development leadership team in January 2015 as the Chief of Operations. In this role, she serves as a strategic partner to the Associate Vice Chancellor, providing leadership and partnership across Advancement for service-oriented systems and policies; partners with Human Resources colleagues to create and execute strategic and comprehensive recruitment and onboarding programs for the University Development team; and provides vision and direction for the department’s talent development, recognition, and retention programs. In her prior role as Director of Donor Relations and Stewardship with the Advancement Operations and Campaign team, she led the first team focused on collaboratively designing institution-wide, comprehensive donor relations programming and chaired operational working groups that established campus-wide standards for donor relations and stewardship, defined best practices, and created tools that earned gold-standard regional and national CASE recognition. Lynsey began her career in development with ten years of service at San Diego State University, including progressively responsible roles in annual giving, campaign operations, and donor relations. She also served as the Secretary to SDSU’s Campanile Foundation.
Kathy joined the College of Saint Benedict in 2015 and is responsible for all institutional fundraising and alumnae engagement around the world. She led the successful Illuminating Lives campaign, the largest in the college’s history, raising $113 million toward a $100 million goal. The campaign focused on growing the college’s endowment—which doubled over the course of the campaign—and increased resources for financial aid for students. During her tenure, the college received its first-ever eight-figure gifts, significantly growing the number and size of major gifts supporting Saint Ben’s mission. Kathy’s career spans over three decades, largely in higher education. She served for 17 years at Luther Seminary, rising to the position of Vice President of Seminary Relations and Executive Director of the Foundation. In that role, she oversaw the completion of three capital campaigns that raised over $220 million for the seminary. At the time, they were the largest campaigns ever completed in theological education. She has led advancement divisions at both Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota and Midland University in Nebraska. Kathy has also served as a consultant with the national fundraising consulting firm of BWF, serving liberal arts colleges across the United States. Kathy has served on the national […]
In higher education for 30 years, Susan brings a passion to her work for supporting people and designing and implementing effective processes, all striving toward an equity-minded perspective. Her goal is to synthesize best practices and approaches to help shift 21st-century higher education toward becoming equitable and inclusive. Prior to serving in higher education administration, Susan taught with an equity-minded pedagogy for 16 years in women’s studies and psychology. She has been actively committed to anti-racism systemic change in the academy for over a decade. Decades of reflection, training, and application have all laid the foundation for her ongoing commitment to working with others to create institutional-level change toward equity and inclusion, via an anti-racism lens. In addition to coaching, she has worked closely with Academic Impressions and her colleague, Maria Thompson, to develop and provide equity and inclusion-focused programming for historically marginalized job candidates and leadership development for all who wish to grow their ability to be more equitable and inclusive. She has served in leadership as a department chair, associate provost, dean, and provost. Her portfolios have included not only academic colleges and departments, but also key areas that overlap with student success. A seasoned administrator who is a […]
I create a positive, energizing space for you to discover what you want and craft a plan to achieve your career and leadership goals. Paula is an expert on how individuals manage their careers in higher education, with an emphasis on career planning, career transitions, and academic job searching. Previously she served as Assistant Dean for Faculty Affairs at the University of Southern California and the Program Director for Faculty Development at the Duke University School of Medicine. Paula is currently on the Pepperdine Graduate School of Education and Psychology faculty, where she teaches courses in organizational leadership and chairs dissertations. Paula has a doctorate in organization change from Pepperdine, a master’s in public health from UCLA, and a bachelor’s in biology with minors in psychology and women’s studies from Washington University in St. Louis. Academic job seekers come to Paula because of her insider perspective on the hiring process. She has seen thousands of applications over the years and knows what it takes for an application packet to stand out from the crowd. Her hands-on approach guides job seekers through clarifying career goals, developing high-quality documents, preparing for job interviews, and crafting consistent messages across the application and web/social […]
Peter is a leadership coach with over 20 years of experience in higher education and broad exposure to academic leadership and faculty governance. He specializes in strategies for a mindful approach to work, life, and a full engagement with work/life balance through emotional intelligence. His long practice in mindfulness is supplemented by modern research in leadership and mindfulness, as well as the understandings and practices of Stoic philosophy. A humanist and entrepreneur at heart, Peter has always looked for the next challenge. After more than two decades in academia—with publications, local and national awards, and academic leadership experience in higher education and in a global education organization—Peter burnt out. After taking a leave to reflect, Peter retrained to build a consulting and coaching firm that integrates his passion for higher education, people development, mindfulness, and evidence-based emotional intelligence development. His conviction that good, careful inner work can make lives better and more fulfilling has been at the core of his efforts to point people and organizations in the right direction. Building on his skills as a dialogue facilitator (he is a UN Habitat certified facilitator) and his training in conflict resolution, Peter specializes in helping individuals, teams, and organizations notice, […]
Jenna brings over a decade of experience to her role as Learning & Development Manager for Faculty & Student Success, having worked in higher ed as student, faculty, and staff. She leverages her knowledge and experience of academic culture in combination with her background in pedagogy, instructional design, and faculty development to co-create solutions to higher education challenges. Her love for the higher education landscape comes from her experiences as a first-generation college student. Jenna joined Academic Impressions in June 2021. She lives in Denton, Texas, north of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, home of the University of North Texas and Texas Woman’s University. She likes to make art, read books, experiment with cooking, and adventure with her husband and young son.
Warren’s 40+ year career as a university researcher, educator and administrator has included faculty positions at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the University of North Texas. Additionally, he has been a visiting researcher at universities in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Mexico, Panama and Taiwan, and has given hundreds of hundreds of invited and plenary lectures in more than a dozen countries. Warren has been Department Chair, Dean and Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, holding this last position at UNT until his return to faculty in 2015. As a result, he has deep experience in the assembly and management of large, complex research and administrative teams, including those pursuing and successfully acquiring both public and private research funding. His biological research projects have been funded by multiple agencies during his career, including a highly unusual ~40 years of continuous National Science Foundation funding. He currently is supported both by the National Science Foundation (public) and the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (private). He received his B.Sc. degree from the Univ. of Calgary, Canada, and his PhD from the Univ. of East Anglia in Norwich, England.
Suffolk Law’s legal writing program has been ranked in the Top 10 in the nation since 2013 by US News and World Report. Kathy has served as Chair of the American Association of Law Schools (AALS) Section on Legal Writing, Reasoning, and Research; President of the Association of Legal Writing Directors; a board member of the Legal Writing Institute; and an editor of the Monograph, Second Draft, and the Legal Writing Institute Journal. She also serves on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Advisory Committee for Professionalism in Practice. Kathy has co-authored two books, Mindful Lawyering: The Key to Creative Problem Solving and the book Legal Analysis: The Fundamental Skill. In addition, she has published numerous law review articles. She also received the Mary S. Lawrence Award from the Legal Writing Institute for pioneering scholarship and innovative curriculum or program design. Kathy has given numerous presentations on her scholarship, teaching, and leadership.
Lauren refers to frontline fundraising as a calling. She brings her passion for education around the “how-to” of this work through her personal experiences transitioning from annual giving to frontline fundraising, and through her research for a capstone project about discovery work best practices. In her current role at the University of Colorado Anschutz (CU Anschutz) Medical Campus, she leads and coaches a team of gift officers who work on major gifts and whose unique roles include focusing on the important work of retaining and growing the giving at the bottom of the pyramid. She also spends a vital part of her time with her boots on the ground, managing a portfolio of major gift benefactors. Prior to CU Anschutz, Lauren managed Cleveland Clinic’s direct mail program and worked in advancement and communications at The Ohio State University.
