For over 25 years, Bryan Shelly, Ph.D, has been a researcher, professor, teacher, and C-suite executive. The driving force in his career has been his belief that, if people are given a fair chance, they will achieve great things.

Bryan started as an Americorps member stationed in the John Eliot School in Boston. In his Ph.D. program at Princeton University, he started to understand that data could be used to help the most disadvantaged members of society. After Princeton he became a professor at Wake Forest University and, later, Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) who researched issues of equity in K-12 public education in the United States.

Once he got out of academia, Bryan discovered his true calling as an evangelist for the impact good data use can make on organizations that help society’s neediest. He was a member of the senior leadership teams at both the Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) and Chesterfield County Public Schools (CCPS). With CMSD, he led efforts to improve staff attendance, designing an attendance measure that helped the district save one million dollars in one school year. At both districts, he identified key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure each part of the districts’ strategic plan, with an emphasis on student performance.

Most recently, Bryan was the Chief Institutional Effectiveness Officer for Richard Bland College. His task was to improve data access across the campus and help RBC officials understand how to use data to increase the impact they make on students. He led efforts to improve reporting on enrollment and student success, coming up with measures of concepts like student persistence and designing dashboards that clearly displayed the results for a non-technical audience.

When Bryan is not at work, he enjoys running very slowly, traveling, and the golden age of Philadelphia Eagles football.