18 Influential HR Leaders in Higher Education Globally
- Jonno White
- Jun 28
- 22 min read
Last updated: June 2026
The most influential HR leaders in higher education right now are the practitioners actually sitting inside universities and colleges around the world, navigating the particular complexity that no general HR textbook adequately covers. As of June 2026, the people reshaping how universities attract, develop, and retain their people span the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada. What they share is a recognition that the people function in higher education has moved permanently from an administrative service into the centre of institutional strategy.
I put together this list to surface the voices shaping that shift. The people below are listed for their own work, not their connection to me. This is not a ranking. It is a directory of the HR leaders whose public contributions to higher education workforce strategy are the most clearly documented and actively shared right now.
A note on this list: I compiled it, and I am not on it. I work in leadership facilitation and Working Genius rather than university HR, and I built this list because the wellbeing of university people functions matters deeply to the leadership teams I work with. The people below are listed for their own work.
Why HR in Higher Education Matters
Higher education HR is categorically different from its corporate equivalent. A chief people officer at a large university manages academics employed under multiple enterprise agreements, sessional staff whose conditions straddle employment and contracting frameworks, professional services staff, postgraduate researchers who sit at the intersection of student and employment status, and the specific obligations of academic freedom, shared governance, and tenure processes that simply do not exist in business settings.
The stakes are significant. Research from the CUPA-HR 2025 Higher Education Employee Retention Survey, covering more than 3,700 employees across US colleges and universities, found that nearly one in four higher education employees reported being likely to seek new employment within the coming year. Compensation remained the top reason, but confidence in leadership ethics and values leapfrogged from seventh to second place as a predictor of retention, a finding that has direct implications for how university HR leaders position their work. Feeling valued and a sense of belonging consistently outperformed pay as retention drivers for those who stayed.
SHRM's 2026 CHRO Priorities and Perspectives research found that fewer than one in five CHROs said their HR strategy was fully aligned with their organisation's mission, and that 92 per cent anticipated greater AI integration in workforce operations over the coming year. In higher education, those two findings land with particular weight, because the mission of a university is not a revenue target: it is the creation and transmission of knowledge. Connecting people strategy to that mission is the defining challenge for every leader on this list.
How This List Was Compiled
I selected these 18 people for their documented, active contribution to HR leadership in higher education, confirmed against primary institutional sources within the past 12 months. I looked for leaders who are actively sharing their thinking publicly, whether through LinkedIn, professional associations, institutional communications, or media, and whose professional impact is independently verifiable. The list spans institutions across the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada.
I also drew on the active higher education HR community, including the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR) in the United States, which serves more than 40,000 HR professionals and leaders across nearly 2,000 institutions globally. Participation in that community, at a board or active member level, was one of many signals I used to assess public contribution.
Category 1: Association Leadership and System Advocacy
These leaders shape the profession beyond their own institutions through their work in peak bodies and professional associations.
1. Dr. Andy Brantley
CUPA-HR
Dr. Andy Brantley has served as President and Chief Executive Officer of the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources since July 2005, a tenure that has seen the association grow from 1,500 member institutions to almost 2,000, and from 6,600 institutional representatives to more than 35,000. Under his leadership, CUPA-HR has strengthened its position as the primary source of higher education workforce research and the voice of higher education HR professionals on legislative and policy matters.
Brantley has served as co-chair of the Washington Higher Education Secretariat steering committee and the Secretariat's representative to the American Council on Education Board of Directors. His career before CUPA-HR included serving as associate vice president and CHRO at the University of Georgia, which grounds his advocacy in practitioner reality. For the global higher education HR community, few individuals have done more to shape the professional infrastructure of the field.
Known for: leading the transformation of CUPA-HR and championing higher education HR research and advocacy.
2. Dr. Alejandra "Ale" Kennedy
Clemson University
Dr. Alejandra Kennedy serves as Associate Vice President for Human Resources and Chief Human Resources Officer at Clemson University, a position she has held since 2021 after first stepping into the role in an interim capacity during one of the most demanding periods any university HR function has faced. Clemson's news release on her chair-elect appointment to the CUPA-HR national board noted that she has more than 25 years of higher education experience and brought documented track records of both institutional and association leadership to the role.
In July 2025, Kennedy was selected as chair-elect of the CUPA-HR national board of directors, a role she assumed on July 1, 2025, with the full board chairpersonship planned for the 2026-2027 fiscal year. Her public LinkedIn engagement covers higher education workforce strategy, employee retention, CUPA-HR advocacy on Capitol Hill, and inclusive hiring practices, with posts confirmed in April and May 2026.
Known for: institutional people strategy at Clemson and rising to the chairpersonship of the leading higher education HR professional body in the United States.
Category 2: Workforce Transformation and Operating Model Redesign
These leaders are remaking how the HR function itself operates inside complex university structures.
3. Sean Moeller
Cornell University
Sean Moeller was appointed as Interim Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer at Cornell University in December 2025, assuming oversight of the HR function, the Department of Inclusion and Belonging, and the Cornell Office of Civil Rights at a moment of significant financial and operational restructuring. His appointment came as Cornell launched its Resilient Cornell initiative, a university-wide effort to reduce costs and redesign administrative operating models in response to severe fiscal pressure.
Moeller's background at Cornell's SC Johnson College of Business, where he served as Associate Dean of Staff and Academic Administration, gave him deep institutional knowledge of how academic and administrative functions intersect. In the Resilient Cornell HR work group, he has led the conceptual work to shift the university from a highly decentralised HR structure to a centralised, portfolio-based model with strategic HR business partner ratios, centres of excellence, and more consistent governance across colleges and units. Public video updates on the Resilient Cornell website and co-signed communications to staff in March and June 2026 document his active role.
Known for: leading a university-wide HR operating model redesign under financial constraint, and navigating the specific tension between decentralised academic culture and system-level efficiency.
4. Dr. Joshua Mackey
Indiana University
Dr. Joshua Mackey was named Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer at Indiana University in November 2025, joining one of Indiana's largest employers after serving as VP and CHRO at Northern Arizona University since 2018. The Indiana University news release confirmed that he is responsible for leading HR strategy, talent acquisition, leadership development, organisational design, compensation and benefits, employee relations, and people across all IU campuses.
Mackey is simultaneously serving as the current chair of the CUPA-HR national board of directors, a role that places him at the intersection of institutional HR leadership and profession-wide strategy. His 25-plus years of experience in higher education HR includes service on multiple state and national HR boards and committees. The combination of a major system-wide CHRO appointment and the CUPA-HR chairpersonship in the same year makes him one of the most publicly positioned higher education HR leaders in the United States in 2026.
Known for: leading HR transformation across major public research university systems and chairing the primary professional body for higher education HR professionals.
Category 3: People and Culture Integration
These leaders have explicitly merged HR and DEI or belonging functions into unified people and culture divisions, reflecting a structural evolution in how universities conceptualise the people function.
5. Dr. Amoaba Gooden
Kent State University
Dr. Amoaba Gooden serves as Vice President for People, Culture and Belonging at Kent State University, the chief people officer role she holds following the 2023 merger of Kent State's Human Resources and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion divisions under her leadership. A Jamaican-Canadian scholar with degrees from the University of Guelph and Temple University, Gooden has spent more than 30 years working in social justice and DEI with colleges, universities, K-12 schools, and organisations across North America.
Her profile on the Kent State University leadership page describes the role as an executive officer position overseeing HR and people-related strategies including attracting and retaining top talent, fostering inclusive work culture, and aligning the university's workforce with its strategic goals. Her 2025-26 participation in an executive programme at Harvard Business School, referenced in her LinkedIn activity, reflects an ongoing investment in her own leadership development that she shares publicly.
Known for: merging HR and DEI into a unified people, culture and belonging function, and bringing more than three decades of social justice and inclusion expertise to the practitioner CHRO role.
6. Dr. Brandi Jones
Trinity University
Dr. Brandi Jones is the inaugural Vice President for People, Culture, and Community at Trinity University in San Antonio, a role that evolved from her initial appointment as VP for Inclusive Engagement in March 2024 and expanded in September 2024 to include direct oversight of Human Resources. The Trinity University leadership page confirms her current title and describes her as overseeing employee engagement, leadership development, and staff thriving while also advancing Trinity's community relations and partnerships with civic leaders.
Jones brings more than two decades of faculty and leadership experience at the University of Southern California, Princeton University, Caltech, and Occidental College. Her research on the experiences of minoritised communities in STEM has informed the practitioner frameworks she now applies inside Trinity's people function. The integration of HR and community relations under a single VP reflects a model of university people leadership that moves beyond the institution's boundary to consider staff and community simultaneously.
Known for: building the inaugural people, culture and community function at Trinity University and bringing research-grounded DEI frameworks into the practitioner CHRO role.
Category 4: Employee Experience and Institutional Trust
These leaders have made employee experience, trust, and cultural transformation their central documented contribution.
7. Dr. Nicole Whitehead
Bucknell University
Dr. Nicole Whitehead serves as Vice President, Talent, Culture and Human Resources at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. When she joined Bucknell in August 2022, she arrived with more than 20 years of HR and DEI leadership experience across higher education institutions including Auburn University at Montgomery and Sweet Briar College, where her HR strategy contributed to the leadership team that successfully saved a college from closure.
A SHRM case study published in June 2025 documented her work at Bucknell in depth. Employees had repeatedly told her they hated HR when she arrived, and rebuilding institutional trust became the foundational challenge she set out to address. Her response included a university-wide listening tour, data-driven diagnosis, and a systematic rethinking of how HR could serve both administrative efficiency and long-term institutional vision. The SHRM feature presented her approach as a practical model for higher education leaders facing similar credibility gaps. Her LinkedIn activity in January 2026 confirmed ongoing public engagement with her professional community.
Known for: rebuilding a distrusted HR function into a strategic institutional partner, and documenting that transformation in ways that other higher education HR leaders can learn from.
8. Warren Petty, Ed.D.
Howard University
Warren Petty, Ed.D. has served as Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer at Howard University since April 2022, returning to his alma mater after a career that included the VP of Human Resources role at Stevens Institute of Technology. The Howard profiles page describes him as a nationally recognised expert in HR process transformation and the alignment of HR strategies with organisational goals.
At Howard, Petty has focused on enhancing a culture of excellence in service, implementing Workday to better support employees, and building the relationships between HR and the university's leadership teams that underpin genuine workforce strategy. He completed his doctorate in organisational change and leadership at the University of Southern California in 2023 while serving as a practitioner CHRO, a combination that reflects the applied research orientation he brings to the role. His public presence at the LEAP HR: Higher Education 2026 conference in June confirms active engagement with the national peer community.
Known for: bringing HR process transformation expertise to a historically Black research university and completing a doctoral programme in parallel with CHRO practice.
9. Donna Bonaparte
Babson College
Donna Bonaparte has served as Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer at Babson College in Massachusetts for more than a decade, making her one of the longest-tenured senior HR leaders in this list. The Babson graduate catalog and the Human Resource Leadership Forum both confirm her current role. Babson College is consistently ranked the top educator of entrepreneurship in the world by US News and World Report, and Bonaparte has anchored her HR strategy in the same entrepreneurial mindset the college teaches: embracing change, calculated risk, and the ability to pivot.
Her LinkedIn presence in 2025 included participation as a panellist at the SHRM NYC Biennial Conference, where she contributed to a discussion on building a skills-first organisation. Her approach to hiring at Babson specifically selects for an entrepreneurial mindset using behavioural interview techniques, a documented practice she has described publicly in interviews and conference settings.
Known for: over a decade of CHRO leadership at one of the world's leading entrepreneurship educators, and for aligning HR practice with entrepreneurial institutional culture.
Category 5: Strategic HR in Research-Intensive and Global Universities
These leaders manage the particular complexity of elite research universities, where the academic workforce includes internationally recruited researchers under highly varied employment frameworks.
10. Dr. Markos Koumaditis FCIPD
University of Oxford
Dr. Markos Koumaditis has served as Director of Human Resources at the University of Oxford since September 2022, taking the role after three years as Human Resources Director at the House of Commons. His profile on the Somerville College Oxford website confirms his history as Group People Director at London South Bank University before Westminster, giving him both higher education and public sector formation. An April 2025 interview in HR Grapevine described his experience of navigating Oxford's distinctive collegiate structure, where the devolved departmental model creates what he calls a genuinely rewarding challenge rather than a barrier.
The Oxford governance page lists him as Director of Human Resources with his email confirmed on the People Committee agendas page, which shows his active chairing of committee sessions through January 2026. In 2025, he delivered the keynote talk at Oxford's inaugural People Conference, describing the role of people strategy in turning institutional uncertainty into opportunity.
Known for: leading HR strategy at one of the world's most recognisably complex university systems, bridging the collegiate model's inherent autonomy with a coherent institutional people strategy.
11. Manuel Cuevas-Trisán
Boston University
Manuel Cuevas-Trisán brings 25 years of administrative leadership in higher education to his appointment as Boston University's inaugural Senior Vice President for People, Belonging, and Culture, a role that began on July 1, 2026. His LinkedIn post announcing the appointment in June 2026 described the opportunity as one he was deeply honoured and grateful for. He joined BU from Harvard University, where he served as Vice President for Human Resources and was recognised at the Harvard Summer Fellowship Ceremony in June 2026 with an honorary AFP Fellowship.
His appointment at Boston University is notable for its title: the SVP for People, Belonging, and Culture role signals a deliberate integration of HR with belonging and cultural transformation at the vice-presidential level. With 25 years of administrative leadership experience in higher education spanning both US and global institutional contexts, his arrival at BU follows a distinctive career that combined community-building with strategic people leadership at one of the world's most prominent research universities.
Known for: a 25-year higher education career spanning Harvard and Boston University, and for the integration of belonging and cultural strategy with the HR function at the most senior institutional level.
12. Sheraine Gilliam, DBA
Stevens Institute of Technology
Sheraine Gilliam, DBA, was appointed Vice President for Human Resources and Chief Human Resources Officer at Stevens Institute of Technology in 2022. The Stevens president's cabinet page describes her as bringing more than 20 years of HR leadership in higher education and private industry to the role, with previous CHRO tenures at the University of North Texas System and Austin Peay State University.
At Stevens, Gilliam leads HR for more than 1,300 employees serving 10,000 students, and has developed frameworks for non-academic career pathing designed to boost employee engagement and create development opportunities for professional staff. Her session at the LEAP HR: Higher Education 2025 and 2026 conferences focused specifically on how Stevens is providing training and development pathways to retain non-academic talent, a chronic challenge in university settings where career advancement for professional staff is often less clearly mapped than academic progression.
Known for: building career development frameworks for professional staff in higher education and leading HR strategy at a technology-focused research university.
Category 6: Leading HR in Australian Higher Education
Australia's higher education HR leaders are navigating a distinctive combination of enterprise agreement complexity, financial restructuring across the sector, and the specific people challenges of managing internationally mobile academic workforces.
13. Alexis Beckwith
University of Melbourne
Alexis Beckwith has served as Chief People Officer at the University of Melbourne since November 2023, leading the HR function for one of Australia's most research-intensive universities. The University of Melbourne's senior leadership page confirms her biography: before joining Melbourne, Beckwith served as Head of People, Asia-Pacific for global real estate firm Cushman and Wakefield, responsible for 11,000 employees across the region. Her experience spans financial services, telecommunications, health, and aged care, and her appointment to Melbourne reflected a search for someone who could bring comparative international HR experience into a complex academic environment.
The Melbourne leadership biography specifically notes her record in championing diversity and inclusion, Indigenous advancement, and talent and leadership development across complex sectors, and her track record of improving employee engagement and driving large-scale transformational change. Leading the people function for a university of Melbourne's size, international reach, and research intensity involves managing multiple enterprise agreements, a highly international academic workforce, and the specific complexities of managing researcher career pathways that span academic and postdoctoral employment frameworks.
Known for: bringing Asia-Pacific people leadership experience at scale to one of Australia's pre-eminent research universities, and leading workforce strategy through a period of significant financial and structural pressure.
14. Kate Witenden
Australian National University
Kate Witenden is Chief People Officer at the Australian National University in Canberra, leading the People and Culture Division for a federally funded research university with a distinctive national security and policy orientation and a highly international academic community. The ANU university executive page confirms that the Chief People Officer leads the People and Culture Division, with a mandate to ensure the delivery of optimal people solutions aligned with the University's vision and purpose.
Her role came into sharp relief in 2025 as ANU implemented its Renew ANU financial sustainability programme, a major restructuring effort that placed significant demands on the people function to manage workforce change while maintaining staff wellbeing and engagement. The May 2025 senior leadership communication from ANU confirmed her as current CPO and identified the People and Culture function as central to the university's institutional response to financial constraint. Leading HR strategy in this context requires not only technical HR expertise but the capacity to hold both efficiency and people-centredness simultaneously.
Known for: leading the ANU people function through one of the most significant financial restructuring programmes in the university's history, at a research institution with a unique national security and policy mandate.
Category 7: HR Leadership in North America and the UK
These leaders represent the diversity of HR leadership at public research universities, liberal arts colleges, HBCU institutions, and Canadian higher education.
15. Dr. Lynne Adams
University of Maryland Baltimore County
Dr. Lynne Adams serves as Chief Human Resources Officer and Associate Vice President for Human Resources at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, a position she has held since October 2022. The UMBC administration page confirms her current role and the HR and Strategic Talent Management team page describes her as bringing decades of experience in innovative and strategic HR and organisational development to higher education, business, government, and non-profit organisations.
Adams has been active in the CUPA-HR national board as an at-large director for the 2023-26 term, and her 2025 participation at the LEAP HR: Higher Education conference in Atlanta documents her active contribution to the peer learning community. At UMBC she co-facilitates inclusive hiring training with the Chief Diversity Officer, reflecting the integrated approach to equity and people strategy that characterises effective higher education HR at institutions deeply committed to both.
Known for: decades of cross-sector HR experience brought to a strategic higher education people role, and active national-level contribution to the higher education HR profession through CUPA-HR.
16. Kelli Shuman
Carnegie Mellon University
Kelli Shuman has served as Associate Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer at Carnegie Mellon University since 2024, joining after a CHRO tenure at Elon University and nearly two decades of higher education HR experience. The CMU HR website notes that she leads strategic HR initiatives to foster an engaged, adaptable, and resilient workforce of more than 7,000 employees, and that she partners across the university to enhance HR programs and services while driving organisational effectiveness and continuous improvement.
Shuman joined the CUPA-HR national board in 2024 as treasurer, complementing her practitioner role at CMU with profession-wide governance work. Her background includes talent acquisition, employee relations, benefits, professional development, wellness, and performance management, and her arrival at CMU follows a sustained trajectory of progressively larger institutional HR leadership roles in US higher education.
Known for: bringing a disciplined, cross-functional approach to university HR strategy at a world-renowned technical university, and contributing to the governance of the primary higher education HR professional body.
17. Bryan Garey
Virginia Tech
Bryan Garey has served as Vice President for Human Resources at Virginia Tech since September 2018, making him one of the longer-tenured CHRO-level leaders at a large public research university in the United States. The Virginia Tech President's organisational chart updated in April 2026 confirms his current position as VP for Human Resources, and his message to Virginia Tech faculty and staff in April 2026 documents active institutional leadership on employee wellbeing and workforce planning.
Under Garey's direction, the Hokie Wellness programme at Virginia Tech received the CUPA-HR 2025 Workplace Excellence Award for exemplary employee wellness programming, an award that recognises initiatives making significant cultural impact across an institution. The August 2025 Virginia Tech news release confirming the award described the programme as a reflection of commitment to faculty and staff health and wellbeing at Virginia Tech. His public voice in Virginia Tech institutional communications and his CUPA-HR board involvement in 2025-28 represent a consistent pattern of active professional engagement.
Known for: sustained VP-level HR leadership at a major land-grant research university, and building employee wellness programming recognised as sector-leading by CUPA-HR.
18. Jenny O'Donnell
Toronto Metropolitan University
Jenny O'Donnell is Chief Human Resources Officer at Toronto Metropolitan University in Canada, one of the country's largest urban universities serving more than 45,000 students. The TMU website describes her as a human resources professional with almost 20 years of experience, known for mentorship, commitment to inclusion, and innovation in HR services. She was appointed CHRO during the university's transition through its name change from Ryerson University to Toronto Metropolitan University, a period that required her to navigate not just operational HR complexity but an institutional rebranding with significant cultural and community dimensions.
O'Donnell has specifically championed the integration of equity, diversity, and inclusion values into HR programs and strategy, and the TMU website identifies her as a versatile HR executive and collaborative, transformational leader with significant experience in bringing innovative improvements to HR client service delivery, employee experience, and technological systems. As co-chair of the staff working group for the Presidential Implementation Committee to Confront Anti-Black Racism, she has applied institutional HR authority directly to equity and accountability work at the most senior level.
Known for: integrating DEI values into every layer of HR strategy at one of Canada's largest urban universities, and leading the people function through a major institutional rebranding.
Notable Voices We Almost Included
A small number of highly relevant HR leaders did not make the final list of 18 either because their LinkedIn activity could not be independently verified as current, or because their primary documentation fell outside the 12-month window required for inclusion at this level of specificity.
Phillip Vaughan, CHRO at the University of Queensland since June 2023, is among the most prominent university HR leaders in Australia and was featured in the companion ANZ education HR directory on this site. Gemma Martin, Chief People Officer at UNSW, led a people function in 2025 that achieved a staff engagement rate 9 percentage points above the global higher education average. Matthew Saxon, who begins as Chief People Officer at Boston University on July 1, 2026 after his role as Global CPO at Zoom, is a voice to watch as he brings private-sector workforce agility into a major research university context.
Dave Ulrich and Josh Bersin are cited here only to note that this list is not about them. Their contributions to HR theory and consulting are well documented elsewhere. This list is about the practitioners inside universities making people strategy work in the specific complexity of academic institutions.
Common Mistakes HR Leaders Make in Higher Education
Treating academic and professional staff as a single workforce.
The employment frameworks, career expectations, cultural norms, and performance drivers of academic staff are categorically different from those of professional services staff. HR strategies that collapse these distinctions consistently underdeliver for both groups. The most effective university HR leaders maintain sharp awareness of these differences and build programs responsive to each population's specific experience.
Underestimating the time cost of shared governance.
Decisions in universities take longer than in corporations because they involve academic governance bodies, faculty senates, and collegial decision-making processes that HR leaders cannot bypass without damaging trust. New university HR directors who come from corporate backgrounds often misjudge timelines as a result. The leaders on this list understand that speed comes from earning trust early, not from overriding process.
Separating DEI from people strategy.
At the most effective institutions, HR and equity work are integrated at the most senior leadership level. The structural integration of DEI and HR into unified people, culture and belonging divisions, seen at Kent State, Trinity, and UMBC among others, reflects an understanding that inclusion is not a programme bolted onto people strategy: it is the quality of the strategy itself.
Neglecting professional staff career development.
In most universities, academic career pathways are well-defined and extensively supported. Professional staff career development receives far less institutional investment, leading to preventable attrition. Several leaders on this list, including Sheraine Gilliam at Stevens, have made career pathing for non-academic staff a documented priority.
Underestimating the cultural weight of institutional history.
Universities carry institutional memory and culture that can span decades or centuries. HR leaders who arrive with a mandate for transformation and move too fast often generate resistance that could be avoided. The leaders on this list who have built the deepest trust, including Nicole Whitehead at Bucknell, did so by listening first.
Implementation Guide for University HR Leaders
Connect people strategy to institutional mission from the first conversation.
The specific mission of a university is not revenue growth or shareholder value: it is learning, research, and service. HR leaders who frame every people strategy decision in terms of how it enables that mission earn credibility in academic environments where HR has historically been seen as an administrative function rather than a strategic one.
Build visible data capacity.
CUPA-HR research consistently shows that the higher education HR functions with the strongest institutional credibility are those that can speak fluently in workforce data. Retention rates, engagement scores, pay equity analysis, and workforce composition data are the language of senior university leadership. HR leaders who bring rigorous data to the leadership table change the nature of the conversations they are invited to.
Invest in the peer community.
The higher education HR profession has an unusually active peer network in CUPA-HR, CIPD (for UK practitioners), and AHRI (for Australian practitioners). The leaders on this list are almost uniformly active in these communities, both as contributors and learners. The specific expertise required to navigate academic industrial relations, enterprise agreements, and shared governance is most efficiently built through practitioner peer exchange, not general HR literature.
Treat the integration of HR and equity work as a structural question, not a cosmetic one.
The most visible structural innovation in this list is the merging of HR and DEI under a single VP-level leader, seen at Kent State, Trinity, and UMBC. Where this integration is genuine, it produces a people function that is both more trusted by diverse staff communities and more coherent as a strategic partner to senior leadership.
Protect the practitioner's time for strategic thinking.
The leaders on this list are managing functions that span thousands of employees and dozens of distinct employment frameworks. The CUPA-HR 2025 Employee Retention Survey found that supervisors bear the brunt of overwork in higher education. University HR leaders who create breathing room for themselves and their teams for genuine strategic thinking, rather than pure operational management, consistently produce more durable institutional improvements.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is HR in higher education different from corporate HR?
University HR leaders manage multiple distinct workforce populations, academic staff, professional services staff, sessional and casual academics, postgraduate researchers, and student employees, each under different employment frameworks. They operate within shared governance structures that require collegiate decision-making rather than top-down directive. Academic freedom creates employment conditions that do not exist in commercial settings, and enterprise agreement complexity in countries like Australia and the UK adds layers of legal and operational specificity. The role is substantially more complex than a general CHRO role of equivalent institutional size.
What is CUPA-HR and why does it matter?
CUPA-HR, the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, is the primary professional body for HR leaders in higher education in the United States. It serves more than 40,000 HR professionals and other leaders at nearly 2,000 member institutions. It produces the sector's most comprehensive workforce data, advocates on policy issues affecting higher education employment, and provides a professional development and peer community for practitioners. Several leaders in this list are current or recent board members.
What are the biggest HR challenges in higher education right now?
Staff retention, AI adoption, psychosocial safety, pay equity, and the integration of casual academic workforces into coherent workforce strategy are the dominant challenges as of mid-2026. The financial pressure many institutions are experiencing is compressing HR budgets while expectations for strategic contribution are increasing. The SHRM 2026 CHRO Priorities research found that economic uncertainty had overtaken wage inflation as the top concern for CHROs globally.
How do university HR leaders build trust with academic staff?
Through demonstrated respect for academic culture, consistent alignment with institutional mission, data-backed decision-making, and patience with shared governance processes. Several leaders on this list, including Nicole Whitehead at Bucknell and Markos Koumaditis at Oxford, have described the trust-building process explicitly in public contexts as the foundational work that makes everything else possible.
What qualifications do senior university HR leaders typically hold?
Among the 18 leaders in this list: six hold doctorates (Josh Mackey, Andy Brantley, Nicole Whitehead, Amoaba Gooden, Brandi Jones, Warren Petty); most hold masters degrees in HR, higher education leadership, or education administration; several hold SHRM, CIPD, or AHRI professional credentials. Advanced academic credentials are more common among senior university HR leaders than in equivalent corporate CHRO roles, reflecting the cultural value higher education institutions place on doctoral-level academic formation.
Final Thoughts
The people who shape how universities treat their staff shape the conditions under which research is done, teaching happens, and the next generation of leaders is developed. That is not a secondary function. It is a primary one.
The 18 leaders in this directory represent the HR practitioners most clearly documented as actively contributing to that work right now, across four countries and a range of institutional types from small liberal arts colleges to major public research universities. Their work is more visible than the institutional culture might suggest, and more consequential than their titles might imply.
The field is producing a new generation of university HR leaders who are unwilling to accept the diminished role that HR has historically been assigned in academic institutions. They are showing up in C-suite conversations, driving workforce analytics, leading cultural transformation, and building the kind of employee experience that makes it possible for universities to do the work they were built to do.
For the broader global leadership conversation, and for anyone wanting to build a great place to work in a sector that has historically underinvested in that goal, these are the voices worth following.
About Me
I am a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, certified through Patrick Lencioni's Table Group, and the author of Step Up or Step Out. I work with school leadership teams, corporates, and non-profits around the world on leadership development, team facilitation, and building high-performing cultures. If your university or education leadership team is looking for a Working Genius session or executive offsite facilitation, I would be glad to help.
Reach me at jonno@consultclarity.org
Sources
CUPA-HR 2025 Higher Education Employee Retention Survey
SHRM 2026 CHRO Priorities and Perspectives Report
CUPA-HR Board of Directors 2025-26 (cupahr.org/about/board/)
Next Read
For HR and people leaders working specifically in Australian and New Zealand education, the companion directory on this site covers 21 influential leaders across universities, schools, and early childhood education:
For the broader global HR thought leadership conversation beyond higher education:
For the Chief People Officer conversation in the corporate world: