Noah Pickus
Head of Global Strategy and Partnerships & Senior Advisor to the Provost, Duke University
Founder, Future Universities Alliance
Noah Pickus is Head of Global Strategy and Partnerships and Senior Advisor to the Provost at Duke University, where he leads initiatives in academic strategy, global engagement, and educational innovation. He is also Professor of the Practice of Public Policy and founder of the Future Universities Alliance, a global platform that connects start-up, emerging, and established universities to accelerate learning across institutions and expand access to high-quality education worldwide.
Over the past two decades, Pickus has helped launch and lead a range of higher education ventures, including Duke Kunshan University, the Institute for Global Higher Education, and the Institute for Emerging Issues at NC State University. He has also served as Chief Academic Officer of Minerva Project, Director of Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics, and co-director of the ASU-Georgetown Academy for Innovation in Higher Education Leadership Intensive Program. His recent book, The New Global Universities: Reinventing Education in the 21st Century (with Bryan Penprase), examines the creation of eight innovative universities around the world.
From New Universities to the Future Universities Alliance: Innovation and Renewal in Higher Education
Over the past two decades, educators around the world have launched ambitious new institutions to rethink higher education for a changing era. Helping build and study these universities revealed both the possibilities and limits of innovation. While institutions increasingly face common questions about technology, learning, and the enduring purposes of education, they often struggle to learn from one another. Drawing on lessons from The New Global Universities, experiences at Duke and Duke Kunshan University, and the creation of the Future Universities Alliance, Noah Pickus explores what universities can learn from one another and why collaboration across institutions may be more important than any single innovation.