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Ricardo Azziz

Director

With over 25 years of leadership experience, throughout his career Ricardo Azziz has been actively engaged in ensuring institutions reach their greatest potential. Among numerous executive positions that he has held, he led the merger that resulted in Georgia Regents University (now Augusta University), serving as founding president, and previously served as president of Georgia Health Sciences University, leading the merger and alignment of various clinical entities to create the state’s only public academic health system (now Augusta University Health System). He has also served as senior executive within the State University of New York (SUNY) system administration and as member of the Board of Trustees of the Southern Association of Colleges & Schools-Commission on Colleges (SACS-COC).

He is co-author of ‘Mergers in Higher Education: A Proactive Strategy to a Better Future?’ published by the TIAA Institute (2017) and ‘Strategic Mergers in Higher Education’, published by Johns Hopkins University Press (2019), and authors a regular column in Higher Ed Dive, ‘Merger Watch’. He is completing ‘Leading Big Scary Change: Major Institutional Restructuring in Higher Education’ for the TIAA Institute (exp. pub. spring 2023) and ‘Leading Mergers and Institutional Restructuring in Higher Education’ for Johns Hopkins University Press (exp. pub. summer 2024). Dr. Azziz is a prolific writer with more than 200 articles, blogs, and op-eds in the higher ed space (in addition to over 400 publications in the biomedical sciences).

Dr. Azziz is on the faculties of the University at Albany, SUNY and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and a fellow of the Rockefeller institute of Government, studying change management, mergers & consolidations, strategic planning, leadership development, and diversity, equity & inclusion in higher education. He is the founder of the non-profit Foundation for Research and Education Excellence.