Adane Gebeyaw Kassa, Ed.D, project coordinator at the City Colleges of Chicago, has been named director of institutional research and grants at Muskegon Community College effective Dec. 12.
He will oversee the college’s institutional research program, including its data collection, data analysis and data mining, as well as developing and facilitating its grant writing projects.
A native of Ethiopia’s Wollo province, Kassa earned an associate’s degree in electric technology from Kotobe College of Teachers’ Education in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He earned a bachelor’s degree in educational administration from Addis Ababa University. He received an M.S. degree in technical education from Dresden University of Technology in Germany, and earned his doctorate in educational leadership in 2011 from Chicago State University.
From 1985-97, Kassa was a high school principal and electricity teacher for the Ministry of Education in Ethiopia, where he was finance and human resources manager in 1997-98.
In 2002, he came to Chicago, where he served the Vietnamese Association of Illinois as its employment program manager and electronics instructor until 2007. For the next two years, Kassa was program director for the Ethiopian Community Association in Chicago.
He joined the City Colleges of Chicago staff in February 2009 as project evaluator and research assistant. He became its project coordinator in October 2010. He had been an adjunct professor in education at Chicago State University since 2009.
Kassa, who wrote his dissertation on effective strategies for recruitment and retention of career and technical education faculty in community colleges, is fluent in German and Amharic.