Empire State College/Home/Meet Robert Clougherty: Acting Vice Provost for Research, Innovation, and Open Education

R. J. Clougherty, Jr. is the Vice Provost for Research, Innovation, and Open Education at SUNY Empire State College. In this role, he oversees institutional external connections and eternal relationships including institutional grants, sponsored programs, and external partnerships. He is also responsible for faculty professional development, the college's three academic journals, and oversees the Institute for Open Education.

He is considered a leading thinker in Online Education and Open Education. His current research focuses on the relationship of complexity theory and learning systems. He is also working as a part of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Personalized Learning Network and serving on the editorial boards of two international journals of Open Education.

Prior to becoming Vice Provost, he served as the Dean of the School for Graduate Studies at Empire State College for five years. In this role, he oversaw all graduate programs, leading to a 44% growth in enrolment.

Before coming to Empire State College, he was at Tennessee Tech University where he was the founding Director of the Institute for Technological Scholarship, Professor of English, and founder of the BA program in Web Design. Prior to that, he was at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.

He is a fellow of the Frye Leadership Institute, he was a Fulbright Hayes Senior Scholar at the University of Uppsala (Sweden), and he has been published in journals in multiple disciplines. He has a BA, cum laude, in English from Villanova University, an MA in Rhetoric from Texas Woman's University, and a PhD in Modern Letters from the University of Tulsa.