In the first of three webinars in our April 2024 series "Imagining the Innovative University of the Future," Duke Associate Provost Noah Pickus, Dr. Sanjay Sarma and Dr. Bryan Penprase will discuss innovative new universities of the 21st century around the world. The discussion will explore themes highlighted in Pickus’ and Bryan Penprase’s new book, “The New Global Universities: Reinventing Education in the 21st Century" and how higher education can set new standards for teaching and learning and nurture a new generation of leaders. The discussion will be followed by moderated Q&A with Pickus and Penprase, followed by comments from Dr. Yakut Gazi.

About the series:

Imagining the Innovative University of the Future

Institutions of higher education are facing numerous stressors and challenges in an evolving landscape of learner and employer needs. Newly established universities and colleges may have certain advantages to well-established institutions, in that they can focus their programs, curricula and pedagogies on what learners need now and will need in the future. How can established and respected institutions such as Duke evolve and innovate based on strong foundations, to expand their quality offerings to reach new audiences of learners, teach new skills and capabilities, and develop new ways of recognizing and tracking learner accomplishment? 

This webinar series will highlight some of the ways that innovation can and is happening in higher ed -- at the university scale (macro innovation), program scale (mezzo innovation), and individual course scale (micro innovation). 

Please register below, and also join us for either or both of the other webinars in the series:

• Alternative Credentials and Modularity as Innovative Learning Pathways, Friday April 12, 12 - 1 PM EDT
• Applied Research and Classroom-Based Innovation, Friday April 19, 12 - 1 PM EDT

Speaker biographies

Noah Pickus

Noah Pickus is associate provost at Duke University, with responsibilities in academic strategy, global initiatives, educational innovation, and policy engagement. A faculty member at Duke for 25 years, he served as vice-chair for the university’s 2017 academic strategic plan and managed the Duke 2030 strategy team, as well as cross-university initiatives in health system organization, experimental and collaborative learning, continuing and online education, and state-wide leadership training. As the Nannerl O. Keohane director of the Kenan Institute for Ethics, he led a signature university-wide interdisciplinary program for ten years and oversaw its expansion in research and high impact undergraduate programming. He also currently serves as dean for academic strategy and learning innovation at Duke Kunshan University, where he previously led curriculum design and faculty hiring as dean of undergraduate curriculum and faculty development.

Pickus has led several other educational ventures. As chief academic officer for Minerva Project, he managed a 40 person team that provided curriculum design, instructional training, data collection and analysis for online and in-person teaching in the U.S., Mexico, Asia, and Europe. As the founding director of the Institute for Emerging Issues under former Governor James B. Hunt Jr. at NC State University, he established a university-based venture in shaping public debate and public policy. He also co-directed the Arizona State University-Georgetown University Academy for Innovation in Higher Education Leadership Intensive Program, a training ground for entrepreneurial academic leaders.

Formerly a faculty member at Middlebury College and an American Council on Education fellow at Franklin & Marshall College, Pickus has written widely on innovation and globalization in higher education including (with Kara Godwin) Liberal Arts & Sciences Innovation in China (Center for International Higher Education). His book The New Global Universities: Reinventing Education in the 21st Century (with Bryan Penprase) is forthcoming from Princeton University Press. It tells the inside story behind the launch and development of eight innovative new colleges and universities in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and North America. It captures the dramatic quest by academic entrepreneurs to re-imagine education across the globe.

A professor of the practice at Duke, his previous work focused on immigration and citizenship.  He is the author of True Faith and Allegiance: Immigration and American Civic Nationalism (Princeton University Press) and Immigration and Citizenship in the 21st Century (Rowman & Littlefield), and he co-directed the Brookings-Duke Immigration Roundtable. He received a bachelor’s degree from the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University and a doctorate in politics from Princeton University.

Sanjay Sarma

Sanjay Sarma is CEO, President and Dean of the Asia School of Business, and a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and the Sloan School of Management at MIT. Sarma was one of the founders of the Auto-ID Center at MIT, which, along with a number of partner companies and its "spin-off," EPCglobal, developed the technical concepts and standards of modern RFID. He also chaired the Auto-ID Research Council consisting of 6 labs worldwide, which he helped set up. Today, the suite of standards developed by the Auto-ID Center, commonly referred to as the EPC, are being used by over a thousand companies on five continents. Sarma serves as chairman of EPCglobal, the worldwide standards body he helped create. 

Between 2010 and 2012, Sarma helped establish a new university in Singapore called the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). Since 2012, he served as the first Director of Digital Learning at MIT and the VP of Open Learning there. His Office, the Open Learning, oversaw MIT’s Open CourseWare project and the development of MIT’s pioneering Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC’s), MicroMasters, the MIT Integrated Learning Initiative, the Jameel World Education Lab, MIT xPro and Horizon. Sarma also served on the board of edX, the global MOOC provider. 

Sarma received his Bachelors from the Indian Institute of Technology, his Masters from Carnegie Mellon University and his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. Sarma's research has been recognized with several best paper awards. He is a recipient of the MIT MacVicar Fellowship, National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Daniel and Fort Flowers Chair at MIT, the Den Hartog Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Keenan Award for innovations in undergraduate education, the New England Business and Technology Award, and the MIT Global Indus Award. He was selected on 2003's Business Week ebiz 25, Fast Company Magazine's Fast Fifty and the RFID Journal's Special Achievement Award. He has authored several books including “Grasp: The Science Transforming How We Learn," in 2019 with co-author Luke Yoquinto; and “Workforce Education: A New Roadmap," in 2020 with William Bonvillian.

Bryan Penprase

Dr. Bryan Penprase is currently a visiting scholar at Harvard University, conducting research on the future of higher education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). He is a professor of Physics and Astronomy at Soka University of America (SUA) and also serves SUA as Vice President for Sponsored Research and External Academic Relations. In this role, his work is to foster externally funded projects that will help SUA’s faculty expand their research and scholarship and also enable SUA as an institution to more fully realize many of its strategic priorities.  Bryan is also working to expand connections between SUA and regional and peer institutions, to enable SUA to have more academic collaborations and partnerships as it expands and becomes more recognized as a world leader in global liberal arts and as it defines and builds on its mission for fostering global citizenship.

Previously he served at SUA as the Dean of Faculty from 2017 to 2020. As Dean of Faculty, Bryan worked with SUA faculty to help develop a new interdisciplinary Life Sciences program, developed new programs for incentivizing faculty research, worked to improve teaching at SUA, helped SUA connect with peer liberal arts institutions, and improved Soka’s unique Core and GE curriculum. At SUA he developed the 2018 Globalised Liberal Arts conference, which was co-organized by SUA, Pomona College, Carleton College, Middlebury College, and  Yale University. He also created a Science Advisory Board to advise SUA on its new Life Sciences curriculum and worked with faculty and administration to develop a new Fellowship advising program, a new CPT program, an accelerated MA degree program with CGU, a new Faculty Merit program, a Teaching Innovation Grant program, more inclusive practices in search committees, and also led the transition to online instruction with new training programs for faculty in Spring of 2020. 

Bryan received both a BS in Physics and an MS in Applied Physics from Stanford University in 1985, and a PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the University of Chicago in 1992. He was a National Research Council NRC Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech and has held numerous fellowship and research appointments, including an ASEE fellow at NASA/JPL, a visiting Downing Fellow at Cambridge University, and a Visiting Associate appointment at the California Institute of Technology.  Bryan was a professor at Pomona College between 1993 and 2016 and was awarded the Frank P. Brackett Professorship in 2007. At Pomona, he served in numerous leadership roles, including Chair of the Physics and Astronomy Department from 2007 until 2011, member of the Pomona College Executive Committee, chair of the Teaching and Learning Committee, and Division Director for the Pomona College Science Division.

Session facilitator

Yakut Gazi

As the Vice Provost for Learning Innovation and Digital Education, Yakut Gazi (she/her) oversees digital and lifetime learning operations at Duke University, including the pre-college and retirement programs.

Previously, she was the Associate Dean for Learning Systems at Georgia Tech Professional Education. Her higher education experience spans over 29 years in four countries. She served on the Academic Advisory Council for Quality Matters©, is an elected council member and First Vice President of the International Association for Engineering Continuing Education (IACEE), and an at-Large Board Member of the University Professional and Continuing Education Association (UPCEA).

Dr. Gazi has her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from Texas A&M University, and an M.A. in Educational Sciences and a B.S. in Teaching Chemistry, both from Bogazici University in Turkey.