Rachel Boon serves as the Chief Academic Officer for the Iowa Board of Regents. She has expertise in higher education governance, state and federal education policy, accreditation, institutional research and university administration. She previously worked in student success and strategic planning at Ivy Tech Community College, and prior to that held roles at the Higher Education Data Sharing Consortium, Drake University, Indiana University-Bloomington and Waukee Community Schools. She also taught at both the high school and college level. Rachel currently serves as Vice Chair of the Postsecondary Employment Outcomes Coalition (PSEOC), a growing coalition of 39 states and the US Census Bureau. She earned her Ph.D. in Education Policy Studies from Indiana University, and her M.S. in Education Leadership and B.S. in secondary education from Drake University.

Elina Day serves as University Assistant Dean for Finance and Operations in the College of Communication, Media, Design and Information at the University of Colorado Boulder. She provides strategic leadership across financial management, operations, organizational planning, facilities, and administrative services, with a focus on aligning resources and operations with institutional priorities.With nearly 15 years at CU Boulder, Elina brings extensive experience navigating the complexities of a large, decentralized research university. Her work has expanded beyond traditional finance and budget functions to include organizational change, strategic planning, policy development, and cross-campus initiatives.Elina is passionate about building strong teams, fostering collaboration, and developing sustainable solutions to complex challenges in higher education. She is actively engaged in university leadership and professional organizations.

Brent Emerson works in Portland State’s central IT unit, assisting teams and projects across IT and the University with service design, service delivery, and process improvement. He is a certified ITIL Managing Professional and Lean Practitioner. Before landing in higher ed, Brent worked at the intersection of Internet technology for nonprofits and cooperative business structures. He studied Math and Philosophy at Brown University.

Kara D. Freeman is NACUBO's president and chief executive officer, the first African American woman to serve in this role.Freeman, a strategic leader with extensive national higher education experience, brings more than three decades of experience to NACUBO and is joining from the American Council on Education (ACE), where she has worked since 2006. She most recently served as senior vice president and chief operating officer (COO), with the responsibility for setting the strategic direction of the administrative and operational areas of the organization. She previously was ACE’s vice president of administration and chief information officer.As an executive leader at ACE, Freeman’s portfolio included providing strategic thought leadership on organization-wide initiatives, representing ACE with constituency groups such as the ACE Women’s Network, and playing a leading role in ACE’s efforts to share advocacy information with presidents of Historically Black Colleges and Universities.She earned a bachelor’s degree in information systems from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and an MBA from The George Washington University. She also holds a Certified Association Executive credential from the American Society of Association Executives.

Robert Haight serves as the Director of Budget Forecasting and Analysis at Michigan State University. Before joining MSU in 2022, he was a Principal Strategic Planning and Budget Analyst in the central budget office at Arizona State University.

Robert is responsible for planning, budgeting, forecasting, and analyzing major revenue and expenditure categories, with a focus on tuition and fee revenues. In addition to facilitating the forecasting and budget processes and allocations to units, he serves as a resource for budget system users at all levels of the organization. He has contributed to the design and implementation of short-, medium-, and long-range planning tools to help assess the impact of proposed fiscal strategies and potential scenarios.

Robert was born and raised in Maryland. After a year in Denmark as an exchange student, he has made his home in the Midwest and the West, earning degrees at Northwestern University and Arizona State University. He’s an avid painter, enthusiastic board game player, dedicated food bank volunteer, and loving dad to many rescue cats and dogs.

Hutchinson is an experienced finance and information technology executive leader with more than 20 years of service at the University of Colorado. She serves as assistant vice chancellor of Campus IT Finance, Planning, and IT Asset Management and previously held leadership roles in the university’s budget, fiscal planning, and provost’s offices as well as an academic college. A four-time University of Colorado alum, she holds degrees in accounting, public administration, law, and education.

Andria Johnson is the Vice President for Finance and Administration at Portland State University, where she leads financial and operational strategy across a $650M public institution. Over her 15-year career in higher education, Andria has established a track record of driving process improvement, leading institutional budget model redesigns, and negotiating complex collective bargaining agreements. Having risen through the ranks from student employee to executive leader, she leverages a "People First" leadership philosophy to build cross-campus trust, manage organizational change, and foster transparency in decentralized environments. Andria holds an MS in Financial Analysis and a BS in Accounting (Summa Cum Laude) from PSU.

Dr. Gina Johnson is Principal & Cofounder of Data EmpowerED Consulting, where she focuses on improving knowledge management and data-informed decision making in postsecondary education through coaching and co-designing frameworks that empower organizational leaders to reimagine their data and analytics efforts and enhance their knowledge management capacities at scale. In this role Gina works with many partners, including serving as the Director of the Postsecondary Employment Outcomes (PSEO) Coalition, where she collaborates with the PSEO Coalition Board to shape and implement the Coalition’s strategic direction, including engaging its members and developing resources to facilitate enhancement, expansion, and use of PSEO.

Gina has 30 years of experience in the field of education. Before cofounding Data EmpowerED Consulting, she served as a Senior Associate at NCHEMS, was the Assistant Executive Director for Partnerships & Membership at the Association for Institutional Research, held various roles in institutional research, teaching, and policy analysis in postsecondary education, and served as a K-12 special education teacher in her early career. She 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.

Zachary Johnson is Director of AI Strategy at UC San Diego, where he serves as executive partner to leaders across the university, helping them align their strategic priorities with opportunities for the responsible and ethical use of AI. He is also developing Real ROI, a framework for weighing what institutional AI costs against what it returns. He serves as strategy lead for the University of California AI Steering Committee, which guides AI direction across the UC system. His earlier career includes fifteen years in education technology and design across three continents. He founded an award-winning, Emmy-nominated AI design studio, and has done advisory work for technology companies including Amazon and Google. He also served in US Army Special Operations. Johnson studied design and liberal arts at the New School and Parsons in New York.

Susan Klees brought more than a decade of private sector financial analysis and relationship building experience to Portland State University 16 years ago. First as a division level fiscal officer and now as the Director of Fiscal Operations and Services, a shared services group providing strategic budgeting support to multiple campus divisions, she has a passion for simplifying and streamlining processes to make work better for PSU employees.

Carl Lam is a resource analyst at the University at Buffalo and has been in the role since April 2022. He works closely as a liaison between central administration and academic/academic support units on campus with budgetary planning and analysis along with the university's annual resource planning process. He holds master's degrees in engineering management, business administration, music performance, and higher education administration, all from the University at Buffalo.

Katy McCreary is the director of public relations at NACUBO, where she oversees news production and media relations. Before moving into association communications, Katy was a higher education finance reporter at U.S. News & World Report.

John McGrath is Founder and Managing Partner of Porterhouse, a higher education and public sector consulting firm specializing in connected financial, operational, and workforce planning solutions. John has led more than 150 Workday Adaptive Planning implementations across higher education, healthcare, nonprofit, and public sector organizations. As a former higher education Budget Director, he brings extensive experience in strategic financial planning, budgeting, forecasting, and analytics. John works closely with colleges and universities to help institutions leverage student, workforce, and financial data for more informed decision-making and long-range planning initiatives.

Mike Moss, CAE, serves as president at the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP). His primary responsibility is working with the board of directors on the development of an inclusive community of practice in support of the society’s strategic plan. In collaboration with the members of the SCUP Council, he works to create an environment at SCUP where members from all planning types come together, share experiences, and solve their toughest challenges.

Kristen Mulder is a Senior Budget Analyst in the Office of Financial Planning and Budget at Michigan State University, a role she has held for over three years. Her primary goal is compiling the University’s capital budget, but she also assists her colleagues with various operating budget responsibilities. She was involved with rolling out the initial training for MSU’s forecasting process and application in Anaplan, as well as the capital budgeting application and others. In addition to these duties, she is also assisting one of MSU’s colleges with their budgeting and year-end processes.

Prior to joining OFPB, Kristen was a Senior Financial Analyst in MSU’s Office of Financial Analysis and Reporting for six years. In that role, she was involved with compiling financial statements, primarily the plant fund. Prior to this, she worked as a liaison with the University’s external auditors.

When Kristen is not occupied with all of the excitement of the planning and budgeting world, she enjoys reading, going to concerts, tasting craft beer, and hanging out with her husband and her cats, Arthur and Cat Stevens.

Melissa Naitza serves as Assistant Dean for Academic Administration at Vassar College, where she supports academic administration, faculty operations, compensation planning, and institutional budgeting initiatives within the Dean of the Faculty Office. Melissa works closely with academic and administrative leadership on faculty workload planning, hiring processes, resource management, and strategic operational planning. She has played a key role in advancing connected planning initiatives that integrate student, workforce, and financial data to improve faculty demand planning, compensation analysis, and long-range decision-making across the institution.

Fernanda Padilla Ramos designs and deploys advanced AI solutions for institutional leadership at Emory University. Specializing in generative AI implementation, she recently developed a custom agent deployed directly within Microsoft Teams for easy executive access. By utilizing Copilot Studio's advanced development and evaluation tools, she ensured the rigorous metric accuracy required to seamlessly extract key financial figures from consolidated statements. Prior to joining Emory in 2025, Fernanda spent over five years at the Bank of New York Mellon as a Data Analyst and Data Scientist. There, she developed machine learning models, built automation pipelines, and engineered intelligent agents to extract financial covenants from legal agreements. Fernanda holds a Bachelor of Business Administration in Finance from Hult International Business School (2018) and a Master of Science in Analytics and Information Management from Duquesne University (2022). Outside of data science, she is an avid weightlifter, enjoys playing the guitar, and loves taking her cats for walks.

Chuck Persky is a Vice President in the EPM practice at Performance Architects, with over 25 years of experience in architecting and implementing enterprise planning and reporting solutions, with the last 12 years, working specifically with Higher Education customers. Chuck possesses the unique ability to bridge the gap between information technology and finance, and has successfully utilized this ability in designing, building, and managing a number of planning/budgeting/reporting application solutions. Prior to joining Performance Architects, Chuck was a senior manager within the Ernst & Young Enterprise Intelligence group, and served as an engagement manager at ISA Consulting.

Jennifer has dedicated the majority of her career advancing U.S. public higher education through advocacy in support of student access, affordability and success; science, research, and innovation; and internationalization and global competitiveness. After over two decades in Washington DC, Jennifer returned to her alma mater in 2019 to lead UCLA’s Government and Community Relations office which works with government officials at the federal, state and local levels as well as community leaders and partners across the greater Los Angeles region to build and maintain relationships and to represent UCLA’s positions on public policy matters. Prior to her current role, Jennifer served as vice president for government affairs at the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities where she worked closely with institutions across the United States to help give voice to issues of significance to public research universities. She also worked in the University of California’s Federal Governmental Relations office, championing UC positions in the nation’s capital for over 11 years. She was fortunate to begin her Washington career as a legislative aide to her hometown representative, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. In 2018, Jennifer was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for her advocacy contributions in support of science and engineering. She earned a BA in sociology from UCLA and an MPAff from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. She is actively engaged with many organizations as a volunteer and advocate and served on the UCLA Alumni Association board of directors from 2009 to 2013.

David Respaldiza is an Applied AI Strategist at OneStream Software, where he helps finance leaders put artificial intelligence to work across planning, forecasting, consolidation, and reporting, all within a single, governed platform. His focus is practical: helping CFOs and their teams move from manual, spreadsheet-driven processes to AI-powered insight they can trust.

David brings more than 17 years of experience helping organizations turn financial data into better decisions. He began his career at Information Builders before spending nearly seven years at Oracle, where he delivered analytics and reporting solutions to customers and was twice named Sales Rep of the Year.

In 2018, David joined OneStream, drawn by its mission: ""Every customer is a reference, one success at a time."" That philosophy reflects how he approaches every relationship. He sees himself as an advocate and trusted business partner, committed to honesty, follow-through, and doing right by the customer. At OneStream, he has worked with finance teams across higher education and the enterprise and has earned President's Club recognition five times.

In his current role, David works at the intersection of finance and applied AI, helping institutions like Marshall University reimagine processes such as cash forecasting.

A Georgia Tech alum based in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, David is a member of the Dallas Association for Financial Professionals and is fluent in English and Spanish.

Terri Standish-Kuon, Ph.D., is president and CEO of Independent Colleges of Washington, where she advocates for Washington’s private, not-for-profit colleges and universities and the students they serve. She represents ICW in state and national higher education policy work, including service with organizations focused on student aid, transfer, workforce education, and independent college advocacy. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Rochester Institute of Technology, master’s degrees from the University at Albany and The Sage Colleges, and a Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Keith Thomas serves as the Assistant Vice Chancellor for Budget, Planning and Analysis at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. A licensed Certified Public Accountant for more than 40 years, he has built a distinguished career in financial leadership, serving as a controller and Chief Financial Officer across a variety of industries.

A graduate of Western Kentucky University with a Bachelor of Science in Accounting, Keith began his career in public accounting with Touche Ross (now Deloitte), where he spent six years developing a strong foundation in financial management and accounting practices.
Following his tenure in public accounting, Keith held financial leadership positions within the insurance, legal, technology, and entertainment industries throughout the Nashville, Tennessee area. His broad professional experience provided him with a diverse perspective on organizational strategy, financial planning, and operational excellence.
In 2014, Keith transitioned to higher education, accepting the role of Director of Accounting at Volunteer State Community College. There, he expanded his expertise in the unique financial and operational challenges facing public institutions.
Keith joined the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2017, bringing with him decades of leadership experience and a deep commitment to strategic financial stewardship. In his current role, he oversees budget development, financial planning, and institutional analysis, supporting the university's mission through data-driven decision making and sound fiscal management.
Areas of Expertise: Strategic Financial Planning, Budget Management, Higher Education Finance, Accounting Leadership, Organizational Analysis, and Fiscal Stewardship.

Matt Tidd is currently the Senior Vice President/Chief Financial Officer at Marshall University. Matt came to Marshall from West Virginia University, where he served as the Chief University Budget Officer for 5 years. He was responsible for the implementation of a new budgeting system that replaced a decades-old process across the institution. He also led transformational projects including long-range strategic financial planning, the implementation of a decentralized budget model, and various other strategic financial planning functions for the University.Prior to joining WVU in 2017, Matt worked for Mylan Pharmaceuticals in Morgantown, WV as the Director of Commercial Finance for the Generic Drug division and worked at the Marriott International Corporate Headquarters in Bethesda, MD in various accounting and finance roles. He is a certified public accountant with undergraduate and graduate degrees from West Virginia University. Matt has a beautiful wife Kara, three awesome kids, and an awesome dog named Gus.

Dr. Ed Vize serves as Vice President of Administrative Services at GateWay Community College in Phoenix, Arizona, providing strategic leadership across budget and fiscal management, human resources, IT, facilities, and campus safety. With more than 25 years of experience spanning higher education, financial services, and management consulting, he specializes in strategic financial leadership through resource alignment, organizational governance, and continuous improvement.

Dr. Vize holds a Doctorate in Higher Education Administration and an MBA, both from Illinois State University, as well as a Bachelor of Business in Finance from Western Illinois University. His doctoral research examined longitudinal revenue trends in public higher education. A PMP-certified project manager and Prosci Certified Change Practitioner, Dr. Vize combines financial and analytical expertise with structured change management to help higher education institutions strengthen financial stewardship, improve decision-making, and build transparent, accountable, and resilient operations.

Ashton Vogelsang serves as Interim Vice President for Finance and Administration and Treasurer at Marywood University, where she oversees the university’s financial operations, budgeting, strategic planning, and administrative services. In her leadership role, Ashton works closely with institutional leadership to support long-range financial sustainability, operational effectiveness, and data-informed decision-making across the university. She plays a key role in advancing connected planning initiatives that integrate student, workforce, and financial data to improve forecasting and strategic analysis. Ashton brings extensive experience in higher education finance and administration, with a focus on modernizing planning processes and improving institutional insights through technology and analytics.

Lindsay K. Wayt, Ph.D., is senior director of business intelligence at NACUBO. She leads the organization’s analytics, research, and artificial intelligence (AI) portfolios, ensuring NACUBO remains a thought leader in data-informed success for colleges and universities. She collaborates with NACUBO members and key constituents from other organizations to propel the use of analytics-enabled decision-making in higher education. Lindsay has experience conducting higher education research, studying topics such as the use of data, analytics and AI; tuition discounting trends and practices; and higher education business and finance challenges. She completed her doctoral work focused on educational leadership and higher education at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

As ninth chancellor of UC Riverside (UCR), Dr. Kim A. Wilcox has overseen transformational change, leading expansive growth in research, enrollment, graduation rates, and physical development. The campus has added schools of medicine and public policy. Enrollment has grown more than 25%, supported by over two million square feet in additional leading-edge classroom, laboratory, housing, and dining facilities.

UCR has also grown its faculty, adding UCR’s first two Nobel Prize winners and increasing the racial, ethnic, and gender diversity among incoming faculty members. In 2023, UCR joined the AAU, one of just four members to be both an Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) and an Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution (AANAPISI).

Wilcox is a champion for access and a leading voice in the reassessment of rankings systems to value metrics for student success over wealth and exclusivity. UCR has been named a leader in social mobility by U.S. News and World Report for five years running.