Heike Michelsen

Heike Michelsen holds a doctorate in economics from the University of Hohenheim, Germany. Since 2005, she has been a member of the leadership team of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University. She retired from Cornell in August 2021. She was the Associate Director for Assessment and Grant Writing responsible for monitoring, evaluation, reporting, grant writing and institutional research. She also served short-term as Interim Program Manager of Cornell’s Migrations initiative and long-term as the Associate Director for Academic Programming. She worked as a consultant for the Social Science Research, the Council Higher Education for Development (HED)—a former unit within the American Council on Education (ACE)—and the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA), particularly on developing meaningful, effective, efficient, and sustainable institutional partnerships to increase higher education capacity building in developing countries. Before joining Cornell in 2005, she was a senior research officer at the International Service for National Agricultural Research (ISNAR), a member of the Consultative Group of International Agricultural Research Centers (CGIAR). There she led and managed projects on institutional partnerships and collaborations with higher education institutions, institutional performance, and priority setting within networks, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.