Gesele Durham, PhD

Dr. Gesele Durham serves as vice provost for Institutional Effectiveness and Planning at George Mason University. Her work, and the work of the Office of Institutional Effectiveness and Planning (OIEP) team, spans the operations of the university, engaging colleagues in discussion about metrics needed for evaluation and assessment of practice, end-user focused data governance, and assessment of student learning outcomes across the curriculum. Durham is also responsible for co-curricular and academic program review, administrative assessment, official accountability reporting, strategic planning, and advanced statistical methods and modelling. Additionally, OIEP manages the administration of several university-wide tools including the student evaluations of teaching.  

Prior to joining George Mason in 2019, Durham was vice provost for Institutional Effectiveness at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Durham’s academic career has included serving as faculty at a prestigious, small, public, liberal arts institution (University of Minnesota Morris) and administrative roles at both a Big 10 R1 institution (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and an urban, access R1 institution (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee). She has also worked with the General Accounting Office in Washington, D.C., evaluating international environmental agreements. 

Contributing to national conversations on the value and use of assessment and data informed decision-making, Durham has served as the secretary of the executive board for the Association of Public & Land-Grant Universities’ Commission on Measurement, Information, and Analysis and on the board for the Voluntary System of Accountability. Engaged with EAB, Durham served on the Product Advisory Councils for both the Navigate/Student Success Collaborative and the Academic Performance Solutions tool. She also was a member of the Peer Review Corps. for the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) and a mentor for HLC’s Persistence and Completion Academy. 

Originally from central Illinois, Dr. Durham received her BS and MS in political science from Illinois State University. She earned a PhD in political science from Binghamton University.  

Education

PhD, Political Science, Binghamton University
MS, Political Science, Illinois State University
BS, Political Science, Illinois State University