Institutional Research & Analytics

The Office of Institutional Research helps drive data-informed decision-making through analytics-oriented initiatives. By leading the institutional efforts to leverage data effectively, the Office enhances stakeholder engagement in support of the University’s mission, vision, goals, planning, policy development, impact enhancement, innovation, and risk management.  

The Office also aims to foster a data-driven culture through data and reporting governance to facilitate: accuracy, consistency, reproducibility, interoperability, and preservation of institutional memory - while promoting responsible analytics stewardship. Additionally, the Office oversees external data-oriented reporting compliance.

Richard is responsible for leading the utilization of data and analytics to help inform the implementation of our Academic Strategy. He has extensive regional experience establishing and sustaining an institutional-oriented: data management, analytics, evaluation, and data privacy infrastructure. 

He most recently served as the (Founding) Head of Institutional Reporting & Data Governance (in the Office of the President) at King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia. And, immediately prior to this, he was the Director of Institutional Research & Planning (in the Office of the Provost) at Zayed University in the UAE.  

Richard also has a deep knowledge of global academic practices obtained through education and training from the University of Rochester, Penn State, Indiana University, and Stanford; providing data science and econometric-oriented consultations at the Harvard-MIT Data Center (and Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science); publishing internationally recognized scholarly peace science work as a Research Fellow at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and as a faculty member  Vanderbilt’s Department of Political Science; and teaching undergraduate and graduate students through quantitative methodology and formal modeling classes at Vanderbilt, and specialized computational social science seminars at Harvard and Northwestern. 

He has also been responsible for leading institutional effectiveness-oriented units while serving as the Director of Research and Analysis (in the Graduate School) at Northwestern and as the Assistant Vice Provost of Institutional Research and Assessment at the University of Tennessee.

Key People