OCCRL Staff and Affiliates

Edward J. Leach

Executive Director, National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD)

Dr. Edward Leach serves as the executive director of the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD), a consortium of community and technical colleges that share a philosophical commitment to support excellence in teaching, learning, and leadership. NISOD supports excellence in teaching, learning, and leadership by distributing professional-development materials to faculty, staff, and administrators at its member colleges. Under Dr. Leach’s leadership, NISOD was named by the American Association of Community Colleges as the "country’s leading provider of professional development for community college faculty, staff, and administrators.”

Prior to his tenure at NISOD, Dr. Leach served as the vice president of services and programs for the League for Innovation in the Community College, where he managed the organization's direct sales arm that provided targeted expertise and resources of interest to and appropriate for community colleges. Dr. Leach also directed the organization's STEMtech Conference, first offered in 2010, and directed the Conference on Information Technology from 1999 until 2010.

In addition, Dr. Leach served as a co-principal investigator for Build It Scale Up, a five-year, $2,500,000 National Science Foundation grant designed to scale up a proven curriculum, in which students participate in a series of complex engineering challenges using underwater robotics to learn science and mathematics content, programming, problem-solving, and other 21st-century skills. Dr. Leach also served in co-principal investigator roles for Alliance+, a five-year, $10 million Internet-in-Education program funded by the U.S. Department of Education, as well as Preparing Tomorrow’s Teacher to Use Technology, a Department of Education grant that familiarized over 1,000 community college faculty and 7,000 preservice teachers with internet-based learning objects.

Dr. Leach is the author of Technology: Connecting Students to Their Community Colleges; Community and Technical Colleges, Information Technology, and Revolutionary Times; Brother-to-Brother: Enhancing the Intellectual and Personal Growth of African American Males; Preparing K-12 Teachers in the Use of Technology: Community Colleges Address the Digital Divide (a chapter for the book Access in the Information Age: Community Colleges Bridging the Digital Divide); and A Collection of Practices From the League’s Conference on Information Technology.

Dr. Leach serves on multiple boards and advisory groups, including IWITT’s WomenTech Project and the American Association of University Women’s Women in STEM in Community Colleges Project. His X (formerly Twitter) feed was included in 50 Essential Twitter Feeds for STEM Educators by BestCollegesOnline.com.

Dr. Leach is a Certified Association Executive (CAE), a designation that identifies association professionals who have completed the higher education, work experience, and professional-development studies identified as essential to the chief staff executive role. The CAE program stands as a mark of excellence and has evolved to reflect what it takes to manage an association in today's challenging climate. Every CAE has passed a rigorous examination on the tasks necessary for competent association management and has committed to ongoing studies to remain abreast of current practices in association management.

Education

• Ph.D., Educational Administration, University of Texas in Austin
• M.Ed., Health Education, Miami University
• B.S., Physical Education, Eastern Kentucky University
• A.S., Liberal Arts and General Studies, Genesee Community College