As a Senior Consultant at NCHEMS, Gina focuses on improving knowledge management and data-informed decision making in higher education. Collaborating with intermediary organizations to enhance their knowledge management capacities so that they may in turn effectively assist the institutions with which they work expand their abilities to use data to inform decisions allows Gina to utilize and expand her knowledge, experience, and skills in institutional research, evaluation, and data literacy development.
Before joining the NCHEMS team, Gina served as the Assistant Executive Director for Partnerships & Membership at the Association for Institutional Research (AIR) where she empowered data and analytics professionals to reimagine and enhance their capacities to engage in sophisticated data-informed decision making in their institutions and systems. She also developed strategic partnerships, including collaborative work with EDUCAUSE and NACUBO, bringing together IT, Business and Finance, and IR leaders to engage in collaborative institutional analytics improvements. Gina established projects with organizations focused on enhanced equitable access and outcomes for college and university students, particularly students attending Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) and military-connected students. Gina has over 25 years of experience in the field of education, including teaching, policy analysis, institutional research, and association management.
Gina earned her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology, with a focus on Quantitative Methods in Education, from the University of Minnesota and holds an M.A. from the University of Minnesota and a B.S. from Winona State University.
Local and sustainable food and support of family farms has been an interest of Gina’s for many years. Having parents and parents-in-law who grew up on dairy farms in the Upper Midwest who experienced the challenges posed to small, family farms gave her perspective on the important role farms and farmers play in feeding people and serving as direct stewards of natural resources. Volunteering with the Land Stewardship Project further opened Gina’s eyes to the importance of locally and sustainably grown food. She has taken many gardening classes, and volunteers at, the Denver Botanic Gardens, and, in 2020, became a Certified Colorado Gardener through Colorado State University Extension. Fruit and vegetable gardens now cover more than 50% of Gina and her husband’s urban Denver yard. When not tinkering in the garden or water bath canning to preserve the harvest, she can be found walking or hiking with her husband and two Siberian Huskies, reading voraciously, participating in creative writing classes, or creating decorative crafts with thread or yarn.
Being part of the NCHEMS team allows me to connect and collaborate with organizations and institutions doing extraordinary work to improve equitable access to, and success with, higher education. Through my work on a variety of projects, I can expand my knowledge and skills by learning from professionals across the nation and world and then use these skills and knowledge to assist partners in asking sophisticated questions, identifying quantitative and qualitative data that help answer these questions, using the data to inform important decisions, and evaluating the success of the decision making. Serving as a collaborative, empowering partner behind the scenes and helping others feel more comfortable with data and analytics is immensely satisfying work.
