Director of Analytics & Evaluation, Quacquarelli Symonds
Leigh Kamolins is Director of Analytics & Evaluation at QS. For the past decade he has been working with the world’s leading universities to help them understand and enhance their global impact and impact on society. He is responsible for the organisation’s rankings, ratings and analytics insight platforms which provide valuable intelligence to the universities, governments and other sector stakeholders. He works as part of an action group on ranking, ratings and assessments as part of the United Nations Higher Education Sustainability Initiative. Prior to his time at QS, Leigh’s background was in performance evaluation, quality assurance and evaluation system design spanning the public and private sectors in the United Kingdom and Australia. Leigh led a team reporting on the biggest school reform programme in British history for the UK Department for Education and designed anti-corruption and human rights monitoring frameworks in the public sector in Australia. He has undergraduate and postgraduate degrees from Monash University in Australia including a period studying abroad at King’s College London, and an MBA in Executive Management from the Central European University in Vienna. He is passionate about enabling access to education and how the power of education can create more inclusive and cohesive societies.
Understanding the social and environmental impact of higher education institutions is a multifaceted challenge that demands urgent attention. This keynote presentation tackles the intricate task of decoding sustainability within the higher education sector, highlighting the pressing need for a comprehensive, nuanced approach to understand what good looks like.
Drawing inspiration from the recently released QS World University Rankings: Sustainability, this keynote presentation will showcase how a comprehensive view of a higher education institution's sustainable footprint can be measured and how its impact can be benchmarked using data and analytics. Despite the infancy of many datasets in this field, the keynote presentation will explore ways to benchmark sustainable performance amidst these limitations.
The power of analytics is already having a transformational effect in driving real action on sustainability within the higher education sector, but there is opportunity to go further faster.
While higher education institutions possess unique operating circumstances, many strategies discussed can be readily applied to other educational settings to ensure institutions are truly achieving their intended societal impact.