Dr. Gina Cinali

Gina  Cinali, Associate Vice President for Strategic Planning, Institutional Effectiveness, and Analytics joined PVCC in May 2023. Gina is an international Higher Education Accreditation expert who has worked on accreditation and quality assurance with universities across the US, Middle East, Africa and Central Asia for the past 30 years. She has been on start-up teams for several new universities in the Middle East and Africa and has seen universities through big campus relocation.  Concurrent with her full-time roles, she has been teaching political science, international relations and comparative politics, Middle East politics, world history, policy analysis and statistics courses.

She earned her Bachelor degrees from Copenhagen School of Economics and Business Administration before doing her Master of International Affairs at SIPA-Columbia and Ph.D. work in Political Science also at Columbia University.

She earned the Certificate in Integrated Planning and Budgeting from the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP) and has Accreditation Evaluator Training from MSCHE and NEASC/NECHE. She has led and participated in 29 rounds of accreditation, audits and reviews across 12 higher education institutions – from 1994 to present.

Before working in the academic world, Gina served in the Danish Foreign Service in Europe and the Middle East and worked in corporate banking on Wall Street. She was the founding director of Fordham University's Executive MBA program and has been the National Manager of Donor Services for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

Gina was founding member and president of the Middle East and North Africa Association for Institutional Research, a long-standing board member of the International Center for Academic Integrity and served as a founding member of AACSB' Executive MBA Council. She is a frequent presenter at conferences and enjoys interacting with peers from around the Globe. She is a polyglot who has lived and worked in 17 countries and visited 128.

Gina started teaching in 1981 and is passionate about teaching and helping students succeed. She has enjoyed new program development, assessment and curricular enhancement. She has mentored numerous students, interns and younger colleagues and is the founder and director of several Presidential Internship programs in the MENA region. She has been the director of several inter-cultural exchange programs for young students in Europe. She is a firm believer in the Cura Personalis approach.