About Us

Dale Allen

President & Co-Founder

Dr. Dale Allen is president and co-founder of DXtera Institute.  He leads strategic direction to remove digital integration barriers and develop open infrastructure solutions for education and workforce institutions, and international consortium members. He is an innovator who has a unique ability to lead dynamic collaboratives to transform delivery of education and spur economic vibrancy.  He has previously served on leadership teams for institutions (Quinsigamond Community College and Springfield College) and Systems (Massachusetts Department of Higher Education) while managing numerous large-scale, collaborative, national projects.  These efforts have generated over $1 billion to support development of scalable approaches to transform the ability to optimize digital information, education delivery and to increase student success.   He holds master’s and bachelor’s degrees from Springfield College (Massachusetts) and master’s and doctorate degrees in Public Policy from University of Massachusetts Boston.

Jeff Merriman

Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer

An internationally recognized leader in educational technology, DXtera’s co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Jeff Merriman brings over thirty-five years of rich experience in educational innovation and collaborative leadership to the DXtera Institute. In his role as CTO, Jeff oversees technical strategy, design and development related to the DXtera consortium. His deep understanding of post-secondary information systems, along with a progressive architectural approach to scalable, extensible integration solutions, guides DXtera’s technological path toward increasing digital integration and access. Jeff’s career began as Director of Residential Computing at Stanford University in 1987,leading the effort to network all of Stanford’s graduate and undergraduate residence halls. In 1998 he became Director of Academic Computing Technology and began to widen his focus to include issues of educational software infrastructure. In 2000, he joined MIT as Senior Strategist for Academic Computing and served as Executive Director of the Open Knowledge Initiative. Jeff has also served on the Board or Directors of the Sakai Collaborative Learning Environment, and for the Learning Curve Consortium, facilitating educational technology for K-12. Most recently, as Associate Director in MIT’s Office of Digital Learning, Strategic Education Initiatives, Jeff oversaw Institutional and global projects, extending architectural approaches to educational innovation. This experience and work provides a foundation for the DXtera Institute to reimagine higher education information systems and next generation solutions.

Amon Horne

Deputy CTO and Director of Strategic Initiatives

Amon was brought in at DXtera to improve the quality and maturity of DXtera’s integration, information management and information usage initiatives. Amon has experience in the higher education space focused on information delivery including Service-oriented architecture, Data Architecture and Engineering, and Data/Service Integration. He has previously served as the Director of Decision Support and Business Intelligence at Stanford’s Institutional Research Unit as well as Director of Data Applications and Services at Bentley University, and Manager of Business Intelligence and Consulting Technical Architect at MIT.

Tom Coppeto

System Architect

As DXtera Institute’s System Architect, Tom is leading the design of DXtera’s Integration Framework. A solver of tough integration problems, Tom brings to DXtera 13 years of experience in domain modeling, interface design and applying services methodologies necessary to build flexible system created to evolve with technology and the changing business needs of higher education. Tom currently serves as Lead Architect for the Open Service Interface Definitions (OSIDs) and Lead Services Architect/Team Lead for Boston College EagleApps (formerly Kuali Student). He has worked with MIT’s Open Knowledge Initiative (O.K.I.), California State University Digital Marketplace Project, and the Open University of Catalonia eLearn Center. Tom has presented to academic audiences at numerous international conferences including IMS Global, EDEN (European Distance & E-Learning Network), University Campus Barcelona, Jasig, and Kuali Days as well as led numerous design workshops and co-authored “Next Generation Learning Architecture.” Email: Tom@dxtera.org

Scott Thorne

Data & Service Architect

A pioneer in data architecture and management in higher education, Scott Thorne is DXtera Institute’s Data and Service Architect. Scott’s principle focus is on the management and integration of data to produce vital information of value to the wider community. Scott’s extensive career at MIT centered on designing simple, innovative internet-based systems, through data modeling and a collaborative approach – with long-lasting results. His accomplishments include creating one of the earliest and most successful Data Warehouses in Higher Education and leading development of services to solve campus integration issues. Through data modeling, Scott developed a common solution for managing enterprise authorization across most of the Institute’s administrative systems. Scott was the Chief Architect of O.K.I., and a Service Architect on the Kuali Student project and has collaborated with other universities in many community and open source efforts to design and implement service based solutions. Many of Scott’s projects represented the first of a kind, requiring not only design and implementation, but also extensive community coordination and outreach to bridge the gap between stakeholders, management, community members and developers.

Norm Wright

SIS Integration Lead

Norm Wright has been working in the SIS space for over 30 years as an architect, business analyst, trainer and hard-core developer, creating the building blocks vital to integrating complex enterprise systems. Norm led the development of the initial proof-of-concept for DXtera’s integration framework and is currently leading DXtera’s SIS integration efforts, working closely with members to implement, configure and deploy service connectors to successfully integrate with existing systems-of-record. For the past 30 years, he has been consulting in the Higher Ed and Healthcare industries where he has successfully designed and implemented dozens of administrative systems. As an undergraduate at MIT, he led a small team of students in developing its Student Accounts Receivable module, used by the Institute for 15 years to assess tuition, generate bills and collect payments. A strong proponent of Service Oriented Architecture Norm participated in the initial meetings to form the Kuali Student project. He is working as a service architect on Boston College’s EagleApps project completing the original Kuali Student vision. He is also working with MIT and the Open University of Catalonia to develop service-based federated learning objective catalogs, integrated with online digital content, courses, and assessments. In addition, Norm has worked on projects for Kuali Foundation, Harvard-Pilgrim Health, Kaplan University and many other efforts to improve digital integration. Email: nwright@dxtera.org

Lauren Lopez

VP of Operations

Lauren Lopez serves as vice president of operations for DXtera Institute, where she oversees its growing consortium of higher education institutions, nonprofit organizations and corporate partners. In her role, Lauren acts as liaison between the consortium, its members and clients, cultivates new membership opportunities, maintains communication among the consortium and coordinates outreach to partners. In addition, Lauren ensures effective preparation and delivery of all educational programming among the consortium’s members, clients and partners, as well as develops metrics and implementation plans for DXtera’s projects. She came to DXtera after serving as a consultant for Civic Consulting Alliance, a Chicago-based firm that provides pro bono management consulting for public sector leaders investing in major social impact initiatives. Prior to consulting, Lauren worked for City Colleges of Chicago, first as an academic advisor and then as district director of retention and completion. While there, she developed and implemented district-wide initiatives to support the success of more than 60,000 credit-bearing students, which led to the most degrees awarded in a single year in City Colleges’ history. In addition, she led the colleges’ Guided Pathways to Success initiative to ensure more than 30,000 students self-enrolled in courses that met faculty-advised, individualized academic pathways. As an advisor, she was responsible for helping students identify their goals and overcome obstacles so they could reach graduation. Lauren formerly held roles as academic advisor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, assistant director of student activities at Bellarmine University, and as an executive assistant at Prism Capital. She holds her master’s degree in higher education administration and bachelor’s degree in justice administration from the University of Louisville.

Beth Havinga

Managing Director, EdSAFE AI Alliance

Beth Havinga is the Managing Director of the EdSAFE AI Alliance having previously served as Managing Director both of the European EdTech Alliance and the German Alliance for Education. Most recently, Beth has served on the special board of the Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economics in Austria, as an expert in the field of “digitalisation in apprenticeships”, and as a member of the expert Platform, “Digital Future: Learning. Researching. Knowledge” of the German Digital Summit by invitation of the German federal  Minister for Education. She is currently chair of the advisory board of Kids.Digilab.Berlin. Beth has considerable experience developing interoperability standards frameworks, having represented Germany as head delegate to the European Committee for Standardization of Interoperability for Learning Technologies and EdTech, and has worked closely with multiple governments and data protection agencies on national definitions for data modeling and certification. In addition to creating her own consulting firm, Beth has taught in schools, managed education software and publishing houses, founded two startups, and worked with multiple education ministries, and corporations developing their digital education strategies.

Faby Gagné, Ph.D.

Strategic Advisor

Faby M. Gagné, Ph.D. is a forward-looking, education pioneer who leverages evidence-based decision making to inform higher ed strategy. Champion of faculty and advocate for responsible innovation she contributes to the Ed S.A.F.E. AI Alliance and collaborates with the Association for College and University Educators (ACUE) and the Higher Education Research and Development Institute (HERDI) in engaging higher education leaders in conversations about the future of teaching and learning.  Until recently, she was the founding Executive Director for SNHU Labs, a strategic research and development (R&D) unit at Southern New Hampshire University aimed at dismantling outdated student engagement models and stimulating paradigm shifts. She was recently recognized as a New Hampshire Innovator by the Union Leader for her leadership in building and leading creative, diverse, high-performance global project teams in understanding how to “blend technology and humanity for the betterment of learners”. Faby joined SNHU in 2015 as the Institutional Research Analyst for College for America, the university’s competency-based program, after more than 15 years of teaching and engaging in research. She holds a Ph.D. in Experimental Social Psychology from McGill University and completed a federally funded post-doctorate at Wellesley College. Her programmatic academic research on decision-making and goal implementation won the prestigious international Society of Experimental Social Psychology Dissertation Award, was recognized by the John Templeton Foundation and the Canadian Psychological Association, was published in top-tier journals such as the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and was cited in several media outlets including the New York Times and the New Yorker. The work has been supported by Google.org, the Hewlett Foundation, the March of Dimes Foundation, the Canadian Institute for Health Research, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and the Fonds pour la Formation de Chercheurs et l’Aide à la Recherche (FCAR). 

Elkin Arredondo

Strategic Advisor

As a leader in the social innovation sector, Elkin Arredondo has navigated corporate and entrepreneurial worlds in education technology, workforce development, and social impact ventures. 

He most recently led business development efforts for ACT in Canada, Latin America, and the Caribbean. He spearheaded the launch of new workforce development initiatives throughout the Americas and established new strategic alliances in Mexico, Brazil, Chile, and Peru. Elkin served as the President of the first workforce committee on the future of work in Mexico’s workforce certification agency, CONOCER.  Prior to this role, he was responsible for establishing ACT’s strategic investment operation. He established the infrastructure for scaling the department and was directly responsible for breakthrough investment opportunities in Australia, India, Brazil, and the United States. 

Elkin has a Masters Degree in International Business and a Bachelor’s in Business from Florida International University. He is originally from Colombia and lives in Miami, Florida.

Cheryl Orr Dixon

Education & Outreach Team

Cheryl, a well-know leader in the post-secondary sector, brings more than 25 years of experience in public policy, advocacy, and initiatives to improve college preparation, access, and success. Cheryl provides outreach and education to the DXtera Institute community — sharing DXtera’s mission and vision by facilitating the conversations needed to help members, and prospective members, identify integration pain points, define needs and identify tools to harness and accelerate institutional digital power. As Senior Vice President and Chief of Staff at Complete College America, Cheryl provided strategic leadership, direction and oversight for CCA’s college completion efforts. Her consultancy continues to advance student success efforts at colleges across the country.

Brian Bosworth

Education & Outreach Team

Brian brings decades of expertise in policy and practice leading national efforts to expand and accelerate regional economic growth and workforce development and to increase access and success in postsecondary education. With an eye to “completion with a purpose” Brian engages practitioners, policymakers and educators and workforce development agencies, sharing the possibilities of DXtera for managing data integration needs as may be required by new business practice. As President and Founder of FutureWorks, Brian directed their deep work with national and state-based organizations to design and implement strategies to increase postsecondary completion and labor market success, especially for low-income youth and working adults. Partnering with Complete College America, FutureWorks assisted several states in the design and implementation of Purpose First and Guided Pathways to Success – both national models for student success in college and after college, especially in the labor market.

Patricia Diaz

Marketing Consultant

Patricia Diaz is DXtera’s Marketing Consultant, managing the marketing and communication programs. Patricia has extensive experience in SaaS technology marketing through lead generation and content creation, as well as social media strategy.

Shokrina Radpour Beering

Outside Counsel

Shokrina Radpour Beering serves as DXtera Institute’s outside counsel. She advises on contracts, compliance issues, software agreements, and other legal issues.. Ms. Beering is an accomplished attorney and executive with over 25 years of strategic leadership. Ms. Beering serves as counsel and executive management consultant for clients in the higher education, business, finance, and commercial real estate areas. Ms. Beering was a diverse legal background both in law firms as well as in house for a multinational financial institution and in executive management for a Big 10 University where she was responsible for planning, policy, and legal strategy for the Office of Capital Planning and Strategy comprised of 9 departments with over 700 employees and $7.5 Billion in assets. She also served as Chief Operating Officer of a pension fund with over 22,000 accounts and $3.2 Billion in assets operating in the United States, Puerto Rico, and Canada. She served as managing partner of the Indianapolis office of a regional law firm with 9 offices in 3 states. Ms. Beering has served on the boards of directors of several nonprofit entities and has also formed many nonprofit organizations. She currently serves on the Indiana University School of Medicine Alzheimer’s Disease and Dementia Community Advisory Board and as a formal mentor in the IndyCREW mentorship program in which senior executives mentor high potential leaders. Ms. Beering has both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Purdue University and a juris doctorate from Indiana University.

Rosemary Galena

Administrative Team

Retired from technical training in the insurance and medical fields, Rosemary Galena is now happy to be part of DXtera’s administrative team. As a contractor, she collects and helps process work and travel invoices for our contractors each month. Rosemary also maintains contracts, assists with executive expense reporting, and assists as needed with travel arrangements and other projects. In her spare time in central Massachusetts, she teaches English as a Second Language, and enjoys traveling, reading and trying to keep up with her four teenage granddaughters!

Dale Allen

President & Co-Founder

Dr. Dale Allen is president and co-founder of DXtera Institute.  He leads strategic direction to remove digital integration barriers and develop open infrastructure solutions for education and workforce institutions, and international consortium members. He is an innovator who has a unique ability to lead dynamic collaboratives to transform delivery of education and spur economic vibrancy.  He has previously served on leadership teams for institutions (Quinsigamond Community College and Springfield College) and Systems (Massachusetts Department of Higher Education) while managing numerous large-scale, collaborative, national projects.  These efforts have generated over $1 billion to support development of scalable approaches to transform the ability to optimize digital information, education delivery and to increase student success.   He holds master’s and bachelor’s degrees from Springfield College (Massachusetts) and master’s and doctorate degrees in Public Policy from University of Massachusetts Boston.

Garret Yoshimi

VP for Information Technology & CIO, University of Hawai`i System

As the University of Hawaiʻi’s vice president for information technology and chief information officer (VPIT/CIO), Garret Yoshimi is responsible for UH systemwide information technology systems and services. Yoshimi provides executive leadership in collaboratively setting forth the overall vision, goals, strategies and plans for the effective and appropriate use of information technologies to advance the UH System. Yoshimi joined UH in January 2015. Prior to serving as UH VPIT/CIO, Yoshimi was vice president and chief operating officer for eWorld Enterprise Solutions. He brings to the university more than 35 years of experience in information technology in both the public and private sectors in Hawaiʻi. He has served as the first CIO for the Hawaiʻi Judiciary, senior technology executive for the East-West Center and CIO for DTRIC Insurance. Yoshimi also previously served as telecommunications manager before being promoted to director of technology infrastructure for the University of Hawaiʻi. He actively represented the University of Hawaiʻi in state and national venues as a member of EDUCAUSE, Internet2 and the Association for College and University Technology Advancement, which awarded him the Bill D. Morris award for individual leadership. A native of Honolulu, Yoshimi earned a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from Purdue University and a graduate certificate in telecommunications and information resource management from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

Jeff Merriman

Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer

An internationally recognized leader in educational technology, DXtera’s co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Jeff Merriman brings over thirty-five years of rich experience in educational innovation and collaborative leadership to the DXtera Institute. In his role as CTO, Jeff oversees technical strategy, design and development related to the DXtera consortium. His deep understanding of post-secondary information systems, along with a progressive architectural approach to scalable, extensible integration solutions, guides DXtera’s technological path toward increasing digital integration and access. Jeff’s career began as Director of Residential Computing at Stanford University in 1987,leading the effort to network all of Stanford’s graduate and undergraduate residence halls. In 1998 he became Director of Academic Computing Technology and began to widen his focus to include issues of educational software infrastructure. In 2000, he joined MIT as Senior Strategist for Academic Computing and served as Executive Director of the Open Knowledge Initiative. Jeff has also served on the Board or Directors of the Sakai Collaborative Learning Environment, and for the Learning Curve Consortium, facilitating educational technology for K-12. Most recently, as Associate Director in MIT’s Office of Digital Learning, Strategic Education Initiatives, Jeff oversaw Institutional and global projects, extending architectural approaches to educational innovation. This experience and work provides a foundation for the DXtera Institute to reimagine higher education information systems and next generation solutions.

Michael Bourque

VP for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer, Boston College

Michael Bourque has over thirty years experience in the field of information technology.  He was named Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer at Boston College in January, 2010.  In that capacity, he oversees the planning and operations of information technology across the University.  This includes strategic planning, customer service, project management, network and systems infrastructure, applications and systems architecture.  He joined higher education, at Boston College in 2003, after fifteen years in industry.     Prior to joining Boston College, he was Vice President, Business Systems at Parametric Technology (PTC), a $1B product development and mechanical software provider. During his five years at PTC, he oversaw a major push in systems modernization in support of global operations. Before joining PTC, he spent fifteen years at Raytheon, a global aerospace leader, in positions of increasing responsibility.  He led major company-wide projects such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and the Year 2000 Program Office.  He was also active in Six Sigma quality initiatives and negotiating corporate volume procurement agreements for technology. Michael has taught project management in the Carroll School of Management at Boston College.  He also previously taught courses in mathematics and information systems for Fitchburg State University.   He is active in the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities (AJCU) Conference on Information Technology Management having served as president and vice president.   He holds a masters degree in engineering management from the University of Iowa and a bachelors in electrical engineering from Merrimack College.

Emili Rubió

Chief Operations Officer, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

In his role as COO at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), Emili serves on the Executive Board and oversees IT, IS security, student services, student materials development, quality and student mobility areas of the university. Emili joined the UOC in 2014 as CIO and was promoted to COO in 2018 after successfully leading the execution of the UOC IT transformation program. In his current role, he is sponsoring the programs of digitalization of the university operations and he is working on a new governance for data services. Before joining the UOC, Emili served for 8 years as Director of citizen services and 2 years as the IT Strategy Director at the Barcelona City Council. Emili also previously served as an IT Consultant Manager at IBM and at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Dr. Christian J. Büttner

German Alliance for Education

After his university degree in business and economics education he taught seven years as a teacher in a primary vocational school. Meanwhile he was a consultant of the Bavarian Ministry of Culture and Education for the curricula in economic affairs and two workbooks for teaching a competence orientated curricula in vocational schools. He is also author of several papers in this field of research. During this time he finished his doctor’s degree in business and economics education. From 2010 to 2018 he was the Advisor of the Mayor of Nuremberg in the Department of Education, Schools and Sports and since September 2018 he’s the Executive Director of the Institute of Education and School Psychology Nuremberg. Christian Büttner is one of the representatives of the City of Nuremberg in the Bavarian and Germany city board and for European and international affairs. He is also Director of the RCE (Regional Center of Expertise of the United Nations University) Nuremberg and member of audit group for Quality Management for Universities by the Government of Finland (FINNHEC). Since 2012 Dr. Büttner is member of the German delegation for ESD at the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and takes part in the sections teacher training and vocational schools. In 2015 he was nominated by the Federal Ministry of Education and Science to be Member of the target group “Citizenship and Cities” of the National Platform of Education for Sustainability Development (ESD) in Germany and appointed to be Speaker of the German RCEs in 2016. As CIO of the Department of Education, Schools and Sports he’s responsible for the ICT-Strategy “Learning and teaching in Nuremberg in the digital age”, Member of Board of the Association for ICT-Education “Bündnis für Bildung” and keynote-speaker in fields of ICT in schools, digital learning and industry 4.0.

A. Scott Fleming

Advisor to the Board, Senior Vice President, Teaching Strategies, LLC

As Strada Education NetworkSM executive vice president and chief commercial and product officer, A. Scott Fleming is responsible for the growth of Strada Education’s affiliates — CAEL, InsideTrack, Roadtrip Nation, College Confidential, DXtera Institute, Education at Work and Student Connections. He also manages new technology and product development for the organization. He previously was executive vice president and general manager of Fishtree, the Washington, D.C.-based provider of an award-winning adaptive and personalized learning platform. He also is the co-founder of Madison Education Group, in Washington, D.C.; he served first as president and then as vice chairman of the management consulting firm. Fleming’s previous experience also includes executive leadership roles with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Scantron Corp., and work with Chartwell Education Group. He served for five years on the staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, working on higher education and career and technical education. Fleming has published work and commentary on topics ranging from higher education policy and student financial aid to international education and development. Fleming holds master’s and bachelor’s degrees from Brigham Young University.