David L. Finegold is the 19th President of Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA. As a scholar and educational entrepreneur, he has dedicated his career to education, training reform, designing high-performance organizations, and international comparisons of skill-creation systems and performance. Prior to joining Chatham in 2016, Dr. Finegold was Chief Academic Officer at American Honors, a hybrid organization deeply rooted in the liberal arts, which seeks to improve the quality and affordability of undergraduate education by building honors colleges in partnership with leading community colleges across the United States. Advisers at American Honors help students transfer to their best-fit college or university, including American Honors’ 70+ top public and private four-year college partners.
Earlier in his career, he was Senior Vice President for Lifelong Learning and Strategic Growth at Rutgers University, where he oversaw international programs. Dr. Finegold was Dean of the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations (SMLR) and a founding faculty member of the interdisciplinary Keck Graduate Institute, the seventh of the Claremont Colleges.
Dr. Finegold graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1985. He won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, from which he received his doctorate in Politics in 1992 while working as a Research Fellow at Warwick University.
Dr. Finegold, a prolific writer of both professional and popular publications, has authored or co-authored seven books and monographs, including BioIndustry Ethics (2005), Corporate Boards: New Strategies for Adding Value at the Top (2001), and Are Skills the Answer? (2001), as well as numerous book chapters and articles in peer-reviewed journals. A frequent keynote speaker at conferences around the world, he has provided policy advice on skills issues to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the U.S., Australian, Canadian, Singapore, Indian, South Korean, and British governments, and he was an Atlantic Fellow and Policy Advisor to the Leitch Review, Her Majesty's Treasury, London.
Dr. Finegold and his wife, Susan, a yoga instructor, are the parents of Sam, a Harvard graduate, and Charlotte, a junior at Yale.