Exciting Transitions at CIRP
The following message is posted on behalf of HERI Director Dr. Sylvia Hurtado:
I want to share with you some news about some of the transitions occurring at UCLA’s Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP). As you may have heard, John Pryor has left UCLA after serving as CIRP Director for more than eight years. John has joined Gallup and will be leading the Gallup-Purdue Alumni Survey. We thank John for his dedicated service to UCLA and to CIRP, and we wish him success in his new position.
As we conduct a national search for the next CIRP Director, I have appointed Dr. Kevin Eagan as Interim CIRP Director. Kevin has been with UCLA for a little more than seven years, and he has worked in various positions within the Higher Education Research Institute for that entire time. Kevin earned his doctorate from UCLA’s Higher Education and Organizational Change program in 2010, and his dissertation focused on the efficiency with which colleges and universities produce undergraduate degrees in STEM.
Kevin worked as a postdoctoral research fellow with a project focused on student pathways into and through STEM majors, and he now serves as a Co-Principal Investigator on this project with me. For the last year and a half, Kevin has served in the role of Assistant Director for Research for HERI. In this capacity, he focused on developing and updating new survey items, co-authoring monographs and research briefs, presenting CIRP data at regional and national conferences, and publishing peer-reviewed journal articles featuring data from our suite of surveys. Kevin comes into this position with strong foundational knowledge of CIRP’s history and the five national surveys that are scheduled to be in the field through the 2013-14 academic year.
In addition to personnel changes, I also wanted to share with you news about a move to a new vendor for several of our surveys. As many of you know, we have joined with a new survey vendor to conduct the HERI Faculty Survey, Diverse Learning Environments survey, Your First College Year survey, and College Senior Survey. We are on track to open all of our student surveys this spring, so please check the survey overview pages linked above for more information. As with any new vendor partnership, we may encounter hiccups during this transition. I encourage you to stay in contact with me, Kevin, and the rest of the CIRP staff so that we can ensure the transition with the vendor goes as smoothly as possible.
We are eager to continue working with each of you over the next several months. I am sure both Kevin and I will be in further contact with you in the coming months, and we hope to see many of you during at the 2014 AIR Annual Forum. Come by to say ‘hello’ at the CIRP booth in Orlando, FL.
